NFS version 4.1 in vSphere 6 provides the following capabilities:
- Multipathing support for NFS datastores
- Non-root user access when using Kerberos
- Stateful server-side locking
- Better error recovery
These features provide enhancement to performance, security, and availability. There are still a number of limitations that will have an impact on using NFS version 4.1 in a vSphere design. These limitations include the following:
- No support for vSphere FT, VMware SRM, VVOL, or SIOC
- IPv6 is only supported for non-Kerberos datastores
- NFS version 3 datastores cannot be upgraded to NFS version 4.1
- No VAAI-NAS hardware acceleration
Features including vSphere High Availability (DRS), vSphere vMotion, and vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) are all supported when using NFS version 4.1 datastores.
Presenting both NFS version 3 and NFS version 4.1 datastores is supported. ESXi includes separate NFS clients to support each version. However, a single NFS share should not be accessible by both protocol versions, as this will likely result in data corruption.
The NFS server providing storage must support NFS version 4.1 and, as with all IP-connected storage, VMkernel interfaces are required on each ESXi host to support the storage connectivity.
NFS Kerberos Credentials provides a significant security improvement. It allows non-root access to the NFS export. NFS Kerberos Credentials are configured for each host. Only a single credential can be created. NFS Kerberos Credentials is created and managed from the Authentication Services settings on a host, as displayed in the following screenshot:
NFS version 4.1 datastores are mounted to ESXi hosts using the New Datastore wizard. A datastore name and the folder location of the NFS share are required, just like NFS version 3. Multiple NFS servers can be added to provide multiple paths to the NFS version 4 share.