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I have no long experience with vmware-vsphere 5.5 .. so i have simple question

Is it possible to share NFS datastore across tow data centers?
if yes ; is it good thing to do?

3 Answers 3

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We are using SMB3 share between two datacenters. It is similar to NFS, so I think you shouldn't have any issues. Our two servers based on Hyper-V, and we decided to try StarWind VSAN. We made our SMB Highly Available, so even if we face power outage in the first building, everything will work from the second one. Right now everything works excellent. But to improve redundancy, we placed two network channels between buildings. Because full network isolation, may potentially cause the split-brain of data. https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san Also, we considered software like HP VSA http://www8.hp.com/us/en/products/data-storage/free-vsa.html but it requires additional cloud witness VM. Hope it helps.

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Is it possible? Well, yes, absolutely.

Is it a good idea? Well..

I'm making the assumption here that you want to use NFS as a datastore across a WAN link. Let's bear in mind that if you lose access to your datastore, your VM's may/will eventually become unresponsive.

Networks will have partitions (see here for a great write up of this) and NFS will do some weird things when running over lossy/high latency networks.

If you can afford to spend large amounts of money on your network links, you could get it working reliably, but it requires a lot of engineering. I would personally put your datastore as close to your vms as possible, it minimizes the potential outages.

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Is it possible to share NFS datastore across two data centers?

Yes

If yes ; is it good thing to do?

Personally I wouldn't - but only due to organisational tidiness - from a technical perspective it's fine, just feels a little messy to me.

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