topic Re: Upgrade SVM from NFS v3 to NFS v4.1 / 4.2 in ONTAP Discussions

Upgrade SVM from NFS v3 to NFS v4.1 / 4.2

BenBrazil — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 09:39:41 GMT

Hi All,

I am looking to upgrade our SVM's from NFS v3 to NFS 4.1 / 4.2. The SVM's host volumes for VMware Datastores (Vsphere 7), Linux Servers, Oracle, Linux NFS mapped storage and CIFS shares presented to Windows and Linux clients.

Our Linux infrastructure is Red Hat 7 and we are in the process of rebuilding to Red Hat 9. We have seen some NFS file locking issues in Red Hat 9 and a suggestion has been made that upgrading to NFS 4.1 / 4.2 may solve this issue.

Enabling NFS 4.1 / 4.2 looks as simple as a tick box in the SVM settings and ensuring that all Export Policies in the SVM allow for NFSv4 access protocols.

Is there anything else I need to look out for?

Is the transition to NFS 4.1 / 4.2 seamless from a client perspective?

Looking at VMWare, it appears that there wont be an impact and that NFS 4 datastores will only be used when creating new datastores.

Any pieces of advice would be welcome. It looks like a fairly simple change, but the impact if something goes wrong would be large.

Thanks,

Ben

Re: Upgrade SVM from NFS v3 to NFS v4.1 / 4.2

TMACMD — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 19:45:49 GMT

First piece of advice: you really should not have all that data in the same svm. It’s best to, at a minimum isolate the VMware data from other svms. One could argue to isolate the oracle in another svm.

I’m sure others are going to chime in at some point

Re: Upgrade SVM from NFS v3 to NFS v4.1 / 4.2

BenBrazil — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 14:20:00 GMT

Hi,

Agreed. I've actually split the data across 3 separate SVM's. One holds VMWare and Oracle and the other two holds CIFS data.

Re: Upgrade SVM from NFS v3 to NFS v4.1 / 4.2

heightsnj — Fri, 29 Mar 2024 21:03:59 GMT

What exactly locking issue you have? Would that be a big issue for your environment?

I was told that it is not worth of converting to NFSv4 especially for NFSv4 and VMWare.

Re: Upgrade SVM from NFS v3 to NFS v4.1 / 4.2

darr613 — Sat, 30 Mar 2024 14:48:18 GMT

Hello Ben,

I would advise you to have a look at the NFS in Netapp Ontap TR
https://www.netapp.com/media/10720-tr-4067.pdf

Page 39 talks about the considerations of enabling NFSv4.x
Page 42 talks about the considerations of transitioning from NFSv3.0 to NFSv4.x

I believe that is exactly what you are looking for.

Regards,

Re: Upgrade SVM from NFS v3 to NFS v4.1 / 4.2

BenBrazil — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 08:27:36 GMT

Thanks for the advice.

Regards,

Ben