6.5.1

Table Of Contents
NFS Protocols and ESXi
ESXi supports NFS protocols version 3 and 4.1. To support both versions, ESXi uses two different NFS
clients.
Comparing Versions of NFS Clients
The following table lists capabilities that the NFS version 3 and 4.1 support.
Characteristics NFS version 3 NFS version 4.1
Security mechanisms AUTH_SYS AUTH_SYS and Kerberos (krb5 and krb5i)
Encryption algorithms with Kerberos N/A AES256-CTS-HMAC-SHA1-96 and
AES128-CTS-HMAC-SHA1-96
Multipathing Not supported Supported through the session trunking
Locking mechanisms Propriety client-side locking Server-side locking
Hardware acceleration Supported Supported
Thick virtual disks Supported Supported
IPv6 Supported Supported for AUTH_SYS and Kerberos
ISO images presented as CD-ROMs to
virtual machines
Supported Supported
Virtual machine snapshots Supported Supported
Virtual machines with virtual disks greater
than 2 TB
Supported Supported
NFS Protocols and vSphere Solutions
The following table lists major vSphere solutions that NFS versions support.
vSphere Features NFS version 3 NFS version 4.1
vMotion and Storage vMotion Yes Yes
High Availability (HA) Yes Yes
Fault Tolerance (FT) Yes Yes
Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) Yes Yes
Host Profiles Yes Yes
Storage DRS Yes No
Storage I/O Control Yes No
Site Recovery Manager Yes No
Virtual Volumes Yes Yes
vSphere Replication Yes Yes
vRealize Operations Manager Yes Yes
vSphere Storage
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