Deployment Choices: NFS vs. iSCSI¶

A frequent question from customers and partners is whether to utilize NFS or iSCSI as the storage protocol with a Cinder deployment on top of the NetApp FAS/AFF product line. Both protocol options are TCP/IP-based, deliver similar throughputs and latencies, support Cinder features, snapshot copies and cloning are supported to similar degrees, as well as advertisement of other storage efficiency, data protection, and high availability features.

iSCSI

• At the time of publishing, the maximum number of iSCSI LUNs per NetApp cluster is either 8,192 or 49,152 - dependent on the FAS/AFF model number (refer to Hardware Universe for detailed information for a particular model). Cinder can be configured to operate with multiple NetApp clusters via multi-backend support to increase this number for an OpenStack deployment.
• LUNs consume more management resources and some management tools also have limitations on the number of LUNs.
• When Cinder is used independently of OpenStack Compute, use of iSCSI is essential to provide direct access to block devices. The Cinder driver used in conjunction with NFS relies on libvirt and the hypervisor to represent files on NFS as virtual block devices. When Cinder is utilized in bare-metal or non-virtualized environments, the NFS storage protocol is not an option.

NFS

• The maximum number of files in a single FlexVol volume exported through NFS is dependent on the size of the FlexVol volume; a 1TB FlexVol can have 33,554,432 files (assuming 32k inodes). The theoretical maximum of files is roughly two billion.
• NFS drivers require support from the hypervisor to virtualize files and present them as block devices to an instance.
• The use of parallel NFS (pNFS) is supported with the NetApp unified driver, providing enhanced performance and scalability characteristics.
• You cannot apply Cinder QoS specs to NFS backends on cDOT through an SVM-Scoped admin user. In order to do so, you must use a Cluster-Scoped admin user.
• There is no difference in the maximum size of a Cinder volume regardless of the storage protocol chosen (a file on NFS or an iSCSI LUN are both 16TB).
• Performance differences between iSCSI and NFS are normally negligible in virtualized environments; for a detailed investigation, please refer to NetApp TR3808: VMware vSphere and ESX 3.5 Multiprotocol Performance Comparison using FC, iSCSI, and NFS.