Did you know: VNX now has VDM NFS?

There’s so much going on in EMC, I’m always happy to find things I didn’t know.  Here’s one of them.

I have a customer who is looking to move from an EMC competitor to EMC VNX.  They use a feature on the other guy which enables logical partitioning of the NFS server into many “virtualized” instances – which they use for various internal NAS tenants.  They asked if we could do something similar.

The VNX has something called a VDM (Virtual Data Mover).  This has been long used for creating logical CIFS (really SMB) servers for consolidating Windows fileservers, and keeping the outside world thinking that nothing has changed.

Quietly in Franklin (the code name for the currently GA VNX Operating Environment) code – VDMs now support NFS.

While I think that for IaaS purposes, creating logical isolation at the infrastructure layer is silly (use virtual datacenter constructs in vCloud Director for CPU/Mem pools, network pools, and datastore pools), there are cases where either for administrative purposes, or because there is no “abstraction layer” (like vCloud Director) above the storage stack where this it is useful to be able to create many virtual instances of NFS/SMB servers on a single platform.

While this feature has more coming (targeted for Inyo – the very close next major VNX software release; and then even more for Rockies, the major release after that) – using the GA VNX software today, you can create VDMs for NFS.

Now we know!  Neato!

Comments

[Chuck Hollis]

Wow, I hadn't heard that either. I'm sure there are a few situations where it would come in handy.

I wonder what else is sneaking around in there?

-- Chuck

[Andi]

We need this for our NS-960, to be able todo multi tenant NFSv4, please.

[Baif]

Wonderful!!!! Few years ago I asked the same question to the instructor of the ILT - why doesn't VDM.

The mobility and DR for VDM looks good.

[Otmanix]

This feature is working fine. I'm using it on our VNX VG2. Nevertheless this feature currently is only available on CLI. One don't even see the VDM NFS config in Unisphere. I hope an update is coming soon ;)

[Brian]

Hi Chad.

Do you know if anyone has tested NFS on VDM and the VNX SRA for SRM 5.0 ?

Thanks
Brian

[Sean]

Any chance a unique routing table per vdm is coming

[Rob Bergin]

Is this the VNX's answer to NetApp's Multistore?? And is there an equivalent to VDM on the VMAX?

Logical isolation at the infrastructure layer is pretty important to some of our customers who want an IP layer that prevents VMs from accessing stuff that they shouldn't.

With NetApp - we use Multistore to create different IP spaces on the same filer - if we can do the same thing on our VNX and VMAX - that would be ideal.

[Doug Youd]

Awesome. Thanks for sharing! Time to get my hands dirty :)