Q. I have an Iomega NAS with NFS support. I get errors connecting VMware ESX to the NFS on the NAS. What's wrong?

A. I recently got hold of an Iomega StorCenter ix4-200d device with 4TB of space on it, and I wanted to try out NFS with ESX. It's not obvious for non-Unix people such as myself what the actual folder path is to access a NFS folder stored on the NAS device.

Make sure you've enabled NFS on the NAS device and that you have enabled root account access. Check the name of the NFS share through your NAS server as I have below. In my case, it's VMwareNFS.

In ESX (I performed this on ESX 4.0), enter the name or IP address of the NAS server (I have a DNS record configured). For the folder name, add /nfs/ to the front of the name you got earlier. In my environment, the folder name was /nfs/VMwareNFS. The Datastore Name is the name it will be known as in ESX. As shown here, I generally use the same name for the Datastore as the NFS folder.

Your ESX server should now be able to access and use the NFS.

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