NFS (Network File System)
In a word of introduction, NFS is rarely used in the Microsoft environment. Windows without additional software only in the Professional version can work with NFS and even that you have to install components. The current version of NFS is v4 recommended due to performance and security improvements, and no Windows, even the latest server releases, can use NFS v4 as a client. Which may come as a bit of a surprise, as of February 2022 as I record the footage according to microsoft documentation windows server series can be a server in v4 but no longer a client.
Rather, NFS is used as a network file system for Linux-like environments. Mainly for mounting network disk remnants in servers. It is very common that the server where the data is processed is not the same server where the data is stored. In addition, the same data often needs to be processed by multiple servers or multiple instances of some software. Then one solution is to just mount such a directory via NFS to all our servers. Another use of NFS is to store various security copies. It is also common to use NFS in virtualization servers, so as not to keep virtual machine disks on the virtualizers themselves, but to keep them on NAS.
What we will do
I will show how to configure an NFS server based on TrueNAS CORE and TrueNAS SCALE. I will cover both because they are a little different, not technically but the configuration is a little different.
Then we will connect a test station on Ubuntu to our NFS servers. We will also connect the virtualization server XCP-NG and Xen-Orchestra.
I invite you to watch.
Commands used
NFS contention command
sudo mount -t nfs x.x.x.x:/mnt/test-pool/nfs-storage /mnt/nfs-core/
command to show mounted disks on a Linux system
df -h
Summary:
The protocols discussed are definitely different from each other. Of course, there is no single best one and let's use the one that best covers our needs. After this little excursion, let's conclude that if we are using Windows and want to keep our files somewhere then SMB should be the right choice.
Please still remember that even the best NAS network drive, as much as it would have spare drives or power supplies is not a backup. Every server breaks down at some point, always have a plan B. B for backup.
If you would like to learn more about TrueNAS write to us. We will tell you how it works and why it is worth it?