Protocols: NFS

July 14, 2024

Ivan Ischenko

StarWind Director of Product Management. Ivan is an expert in virtualization and storage architecture. With deep knowledge of software-defined storage and data protection, he provides technical leadership in solution design and product strategy. Ivan delivers high-authority insights into modernizing enterprise-scale IT infrastructure and optimizing virtualized ecosystems.

A distributed file system protocol for efficient file sharing and remote data access in Linux environments.

Intro

When it comes to accessing and sharing files remotely with ease, the top choice for most system administrators is the Network File System (NFS). NFS file shares can be used to store both files and virtual machines (VMs). Modern virtualization platforms, including VMware vSphere, Proxmox VE, and most other KVM-based hypervisors, support the use of NFS as shared storage. NFS is more convenient compared to Fibre Channel (FC) and iSCSI when it comes to exporting and accessing storage. However, setting up a traditional High Availability (HA) NFS File Server can present certain challenges.

Problem

Network File System (NFS) doesn’t offer built-in High Availability (HA) functionality, requiring dependence on some form of shared storage. The capital expenses may vary depending on the technology and additional hardware used to meet this requirement, such as SAN, NAS, or shared JBOD setup. Additionally, the number of components required to set up an HA NFS share adds complexity to the configuration and maintenance of such a setup.

Solution

StarWind’s implementation of highly available NFS shares is achieved without the need for shared storage hardware, allowing for the implementation of a highly available HCI architecture on existing servers. StarWind significantly reduces both capital and operational expenses by eliminating the need for expensive dedicated SAN and NAS appliances, or DAS, and by reducing the cluster footprint to as few as two nodes. Despite the compact two-node cluster size, StarWind ensures high redundancy and blazing-fast performance by utilizing the state-of-the-art NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) protocol.

Conclusion

StarWind significantly cuts down a company’s capital and operational expenses while offering a strong foundation for building and maintaining a highly available NFS shares infrastructure. StarWind also ensures a higher return on investment (ROI) by maximizing the efficiency of hardware resource utilization.