I just wanted to share with you all. We are using a small NetApp with NFS for hosting ESX 3.5 Update 4 and ESX 4 RC Virtual Machines.
MODEL: FAS2020-R5
SW VERSION: 7.2.4L1
We have about 9 Windows VMs each one using about 20 GB disk space. There are Active Directory Domain Controllers, Exchange 2003 and 2007 servers, Windows Administration and Application servers and workstations and even Solaris 10 and Windows 2008 64 bit machines.
# du -h vmnfs/
21G vmnfs/vhq/dc1
21G vmnfs/vhq/dc2
21G vmnfs/vhq/vc
21G vmnfs/vhq/wadmin
8.6G vmnfs/vhq/w2008
91G vmnfs/vhq
31G vmnfs/eng/solaris10
31G vmnfs/eng
21G vmnfs/W2K3template
21G vmnfs/SW-Node01
21G vmnfs/SW-Node02
If we include the snapshots there is 1.6TB of data available and being served up with only 21GB of disk space being used!
> df -h /vol/vmnfs
Filesystem total used avail capacity Mounted on
/vol/vmnfs/ 400GB 21GB 378GB 5% /vol/vmnfs/
> df -sh /vol/vmnfs
Filesystem used saved %saved
/vol/vmnfs/ 21GB 160GB 88%
> man nfs
The disk space savings generated by the shared space is
shown in the saved column. The space used plus the space
saved would be the total disk space usage, if no space was
shared. The %saved is calculated as [saved / (used + saved)].
Below is a list of the maximum volume size for each storage system:
| Storage system (with nearstor_option enabled) | Max. A-SIS deduplication volume size |
| FAS6070, FAS6080, N7800 | 16TB |
| FAS6030, FAS6040, N7600 | 10TB |
| FAS3070, N5600 | 6TB |
| NearStore R200 | 4TB |
| FAS3040, N5300 | 3TB |
| FAS3050, N5500 | 2TB |
| FAS3020, N5200 | 1TB |
| FAS2050 | 1TB |
| FAS2020 | 0.5TB |
You can use MRTG to graph the disk space saved by A-SIS deduplication by volume name.
What has your experience been with using A-SIS from NetApp with ESX hosts over NFS?