During my whole career with VMware vSphere, I’ve been using Fibre Channel as a storage protocol. When it comes to a home lab I’ve tried iSCSI Nexenta iSCSI installation and configuration for ESXi and iSCSI Software Adapter configuration using vSphere Web Client f but I find the configuration more complex than using NFS exports. Today I will show you how to add NFS 3.0 export to VMware ESXi 6.*.

Without further due let’s add NFS export to VMware ESXi 6.5.

Add NFS export to VMware ESXi 6.5

1. Login to vSphere environment and select ESXi host.Click Configure -> Datastores and choose the icon for creating new datastore.
2. On the New Datastore, creation wizard, choose NFS and click next.
3. Choose NFS 3.0 as an NFS version and click next.
4. Provide datastore name, folder, and server and click next.
5. On the ready to complete section simply click Finish.
6. New NFS based datastore was created.

Mount NFS Datastore to additional Hosts

Starting from vSphere 6.0 VMware introduced really handy feature to mount NFS Datastore to additional hosts directly from Web Client.

1. Choose datastore you would like to add to additional Hosts and select Mount Datastore to Additional Hosts.
2. Choose ESXi hosts that you want to mount the datastore on. Click Ok.
3. After few second NFS Datastore will be added to previously selected ESXi servers.

Summary

As you saw, the procedure isn’t extremely complicated and greatly improved. I really love how easy it is to mount NFS datastores to additional ESXi hosts.