Iomega StorCenter Pro NAS and NFS: Good Practices

Posted on September 11, 2009 by PiroNet

Here a list a settings to change to properly accomodate NFS on an Iomega StorCenter Pro NAS:

  • NFS.MaxVolumes = 32
  • NFS.HeartbeatFrequency = 12
  • NFS.HeartbeatTimeout = 5
  • NFS.HeartbeatMaxFailures = 10
  • Net.TcpipHeapSize = 30

The three heartbeat options control heartbeat counts and timeouts. In the event of a brief network connection loss, reboot, or failure of the NFS server, the ESX Server will not simply fail the NFS datastores. The NFS client in ESX relies on heartbeats to verify the NFS shares are available. Therefore, increasing theNFS heartbeat frequency will ensure the NFS datastore I/O can resume much sooner, once the NFS server comes back.

The TCP/IP heap is memory used for TCP/IP buffers for NFS. The default NFS.SendBufferSize is 264KB, and the default NFS.ReceiveBufferSize is 128KB. So with two sockets per volume, the total heap needed per volume is 784KB. If you want to create a total of 32 NFS datastores, then you need approximately 25MB in heap size. If you set the heap size to 30MB, you will ensure the best NFS datastore performance when the maximum number of datastores are created.

Source: Iomega.com

About PiroNet

Didier Pironet is an independent blogger and freelancer with +15 years of IT industry experience. Didier is also a former VMware inc. employee where he specialised in Datacenter and Cloud Infrastructure products as well as Infrastructure, Operations and IT Business Management products. Didier is passionate about technologies and he is found to be a creative and a visionary thinker, expressing with passion and excitement, hopefully inspiring and enrolling people to innovation and change.
This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

1 Response to Iomega StorCenter Pro NAS and NFS: Good Practices

Leave a comment