NFS

April 24, 2026 · in Intro to SAN and NAS Storage (Neil Anderson)

Network File System, developed by Sun Microsystems for UNIX clients: the mirror image of SMB on the Windows side. Windows clients can access NFS exports too, it just isn’t their native protocol.

It’s common in virtualization: VMware VMFS datastores frequently sit on NFS (SAN protocols are the alternative).

The vocabulary: servers “export,” clients “mount” the export.

Redundant networking mirrors the CIFS setup: two array ports on separate switches with their own IPs (e0d 172.23.3.110, e0e .111 in the course example).