You may hit that performance wall sooner with IP than with Fibre Channel, since many infrastructures are still 1-Gigabit Ethernet based. 10-Gigabit Ethernet can solve much of the performance bottleneck, but thus far a standard 10-GigE NIC in a VMware Host only achieves about 40 to 50 percent of the available bandwidth because of queuing issues. To get around this, VMware developed NetQueue, which, when combined with a supported card from suppliers like Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC), Neterion Inc. , and Solarflare Communications Inc. , achieves almost full line speed. All of that leads to added cost and complexity, which again minimizes some of the advantages.
There are some other challenges with NFS/NAS and VMware. You can't boot the ESX server with it, just the virtual machine, so if you want to boot everything from shared storage you will need to mix in another protocol. Second, it does not support RDM and, therefore, Microsoft Clusters. If that is important for you, again you will have to mix in another protocol. Finally it seems that, thus far, NFS support is the last protocol covered for some of the newer VMware features like Storage VMotion and Site Recovery Manager.
What we are seeing is that NAS/NFS is ideal for medium to low I/O requirement workloads, and Fibre is good for medium to high requirement workloads. In a future entry, we will look at the logic behind mixing the two and how hard that is to put together.
George Crump is founder of Storage Switzerland , which provides strategic consulting and analysis to storage users, suppliers, and integrators. Prior to Storage Switzerland, he was CTO at one of the nation's largest integrators.
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