Rotten mud: used together with NFS storage and vsphere

This article is first published in the dark world.

The company's server virtualization uses the VM esxi 5.0, in order to make more effective use of the server's hard disk space. Store all the image files on another Linux server, so that you can directly use the image files on the Linux Server when installing a virtual machine using vsphere, to save the space on the esxi hard disk.

To achieve this goal, we must first configure the NFS Network File System on the Linux server.

Linux OS: centos 6.4 64bit

Esxi: 5.0 vsphere: 5.0

The required software packages for NFS network files include: nfs-utils and rpcbind.

The nfs-utils package provides NFS server programs and corresponding management tools, while rpcbind is a program for managing RPC connections. The rpcbind service is mandatory for NFS, because it is a dynamic port distribution daemon of NFS, NFS cannot be started if rpcbind is not started. Note that Portmap is used in versions earlier than centos5 and rpcbind is used in Versions later than centos6.

Log on to the Linux server and query nfs-related software packages.

Yum list NFS *

Directly install the required software package for NFS:

Yum-y install NFS * or yum-y install nfs-utils *

Install the rpcbind package:

Yum-y install rpcbind

Create a directory for external sharing:

Mkdir-P/data/work/soft/ISO/

After completing the preceding operations, Configure NFS, edit the exports file, and enter the following content:

/Data/work/soft/ISO/* (RW)

This statement includes three parts:

File directory to be shared

* Indicates all users

RW indicates that all users have read and write permissions on this directory.

Note that the exports configuration file is generated after rpcbind is installed. The file is located in/etc/exports.

After the preceding configuration, we need to start the rpcbind service and then start the NFS service.

Note that permissions and firewall issues are not taken into account at this time.

After NFS is started normally, we will configure vsphere now.

Open vsphere to connect to esxi, such:

After entering vsphere, We need to select "configuration"-"Storage"-"add storage", such:

Storage type. here we need to select "Network File System", for example:

In the server option, enter the server address where NFS is located.

Enter the NFS shared directory in the folder option.

You can customize the data storage name options.

For example:

After adding the NFS storage, you can view the newly added NFS storage in the storage option. For example:

You can also browse the NFS content:

We can also connect to esxi through SSH to view the added NFS storage, such: