Hi All,
I have a relatively simple scenario but I'm having a hard time getting it to work the way I thought it would. I'm pretty much a one-man show and new to NFS, so maybe I'm just missing the boat. We are migrating off of fibre channel storage to NFS with VMware for the sake of simplicity and ease of use.
Here is my setup:
NetApp:
I have an AFF8080 with a single LIF on 10GbE to use as a NFS datastore for VMs. I have the LIF setup on a 10GbE link on controller #1 port 0be, with a failover group set to failover to 0be on controller #2.
Ethernet Switches:
Two 10GbE switches. One cable to controller #1, the other two controller #2.
Host:
For this example, I have a single ESXi 6.7u3 host and vSphere Standard. The host has 2 physical NIC cards with 2 ports each for a total of 4 ports. I have two cables running to one ethernet switch and two to the other. I have setup a single VMKernel port with an IP address for the storage traffic and have added it to a standard vSwitch.
The NetApp LIF, VMkernel adapter, and vSwitch are set to MTU 9000 and the switches 9216. I have VSC installed on vCenter and the NFS VIAA plugin installed on the host. All NFS, MPIO, and Adapter settings in VSC are green.
With this setup, I can easily add the NFS datastore and access it from vCenter. I placed a test Windows Server VM on there and it runs without issue. My dilemma is that when I simulate a failover, either by pulling a cable from the switch or NetApp, or by migating the LIF from controller #1 to #2, I get an average of about 30 seconds on my RDP session to the VM, before it becomes unresponsive. As soon as I migrate the LIF back to the home port (controller #1), my RDP session is restored. When I try to remote into the VM from vCenter, it just gives me a black screen so it must be in some kind of paused state looking for a connection to the storage. The datastore still seems to be accessible from vCenter (e.g. I can browse for files or create folders). It does not say "inaccessible" like I would think it should.
I've tried playing with the vSwitch settings. Currenlty I have the VMkernel adapter set with all four NICs (ports) to Active. I've tried to set one to active and one to standby but I still end up with the same results. I also have played around with the failback, notify switch, and load balancing settings to no avail.
I've done countless Google searches and still am not sure where I'm going wrong. Maybe this just isn't how NFS works? Or maybe my network setup is just too simple to accomplish what I'm trying to do.
Any insight would be appreciated!
