In the VI3 Install & Config class I recommend to students that they use a physical windows machine to hold a library of ISO images to install and update VMs from. I recommend that they use Microsoft’s Services for Unix to make the same library available as an NFS datastore and a windows share.
It wasn’t until I came to set this up in my office that I found it wasn’t as simple and easy as you’d hope. So naturally I turned to the great revealer for an answer. The answer that I liked was in the form of a blog entry that outlined the steps very neatly. The rest of the site is worth a look too, particularly the Shared Blogger part.
I can now go back to telling students to set up Services for Unix (or Services for NFS in Win2003R2) with a clear conscience.
© 2007, Alastair. All rights reserved.
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Hi Anthony,
I setup NFS yesterday with no problems using the Windows Service for Unix however I have one question regarding the user mapping. Is it best practise to map a local windows admin account to the root user account on ESX? Or should a lower level account be mapped to on ESX? From articles I’ve seen so far I haven’t seen any indication to not map to root…… but would like it clarified.
Thanks
Sorry….. Alistair…. I know too many Alistar’s!!
Thanks
The VMKernel does all access as root, so the only user that needs to be mapped is root and root must be mapped (step 3).
This is also why the allow root access checkbox must be selected on the NFS share tab in step 4.
By the way I’m Alastair not Alistar.
There are too many ways to spell Alastair!
Thanks for clearing that up Alastair 🙂