NFS is one of the inexpensive  storage solution for VMWare esx / esxi hosts.



 It's very easy to mount nfs share on a Esxi host, but some times, if you mess up with /etc/exports file or misconfigured it you stuck at mounting the NFS share. Let see where could be this file misconfigured.

correct way

/var/vm_backup      *(rw,sync,no_root_squash)

above configuration allows every one to mount the share since we metioned '*', which is not secured, so we have to either mention specific esxi hosts to make more secured like below,

/var/vm_backup   192.168.1.10(rw,sync,no_root_squash)

above configurations is good, but main problem starts here and little tricky to trace it, Thing is we need to create a vmkernel port group in order to let nfs traffic pass through so , we'll assign an IP for that vmkernel.  But we often forget this thing and only add Esxi host IP in exports file, so vmkernel IP gets blocked by nfs server.

RESOLUTION:

just add vmkernel ip also in exports file or simply put '*' to allow all the IP addresses like below.

/var/vm_backup   192.168.1.10(rw,sync,no_root_squash) 192.168.1.11(rw,sync,no_root_squash)

                                                        (or)

/var/vm_backup   *(rw,sync,no_root_squash)

Cheers
gil...