Administrator Guide
14 Dell FS8600 with VMware vSphere Deployment and Configuration Best practices
5 NFS Datastore Traffic Load Sharing
NFS Datastores Network
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Figure 4 Load Sharing among ESX Host Links
Using more than a single physical NIC on each ESX host provides fault tolerance and, when properly set up, can
significantly increase the aggregated logical link throughput. The NICs on each ESX host that are allocated for NFS
datastore traffic should be configured as a team when the user desires traffic distribution among them.
5.1 Subnet-Based Load Sharing
For outbound NFS datastore traffic, an ESX host uses a VMkernel port on the same subnet as the destination NFS server
IP. If several available VMkernel ports exist in the same subnet, the host will only use a single VMkernel port and a
single VMNIC. The subnet-based load sharing method uses multiple destination subnets and VMkernel ports to access
them.
NFS datastore traffic from an ESX host can be distributed among its physical links if the following conditions are met:
a. The corresponding NICs are teamed.
b. VMkernel ports are configured with IP addresses in different subnets.
Note: When applying subnet-based load sharing, the load balancing method of the VMkernel port group should be set
NFS Datastore Traffic Configuration17)
In a subnet-based load sharing configuration, first determine the number of subnets required to effectively distribute the
traffic among the links on a team. All hosts then share the same subnets