Support for nConnect feature added in ESXi's NFS41 client

Products

• VMware vSphere ESX 8.x

Issue/Introduction

This KB article presents the details about the "nConnect" feature in ESXi NFS41 client

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0 U3 and above

Resolution

• From ESXi 8.0U3 release onwards, users will see a new option "number of connections" -c in esxcli, while mounting NFS Version 4.1 datastores.
• The nConnect feature provides facility to add multiple connections to an NFSv41 datastore. This feature is currently available only through the command line interface.

 

• When adding a new NFSv41 datastore, the number of connections can be specified at the time of the mount using the command:

           esxcli storage nfs41 add -H <host> -v <volume-label> -s <remote_share> -c <number_of_connections>

• The maximum number of connections per NFSv41 datastore are limited to "4" by default, however it can be increased to "8" using advanced NFS41 option:

           esxcfg-advcfg -s 8 /NFS41/MaxNConnectConns
           esxcfg-advcfg -g /NFS41/MaxNConnectConns

•  For an existing NFSv41 datastore, the number of connections can be increased or decreased at run time using the following command:

            esxcli storage nfs41 param set -v <volume-label> -c <number_of_connections>

• When an NFS41 datastore is mounted with multipaths and nConnect then multiple connections are created for each of the path:

           esxcli storage nfs41 add -H <IP1,IP2> -v <volume-label> -s <remote_share> -c <number_of_connections>

Additional Information

Connection sharing with NFS41 mounts

AUTH_SYS and KRB mounts with NFS41 nConnect