Home / server / Questions / 762611
Accepted
James White
Asked: 2016-03-10 03:22:52 +0800 CST

ESXi 6.0 has stopped mounting NFS Shares

  • 772

After a reboot of a ESXi 6.0 server it will no longer mount several NFS shares being hosted on a Windows Server 2012 R2 box. Previously these shares were working fine, but now any NFS mount is met with the following error:

The NFS server does not support MOUNT version 3 over TCP

This is strange because the NFS server has both version 3 and 4 enabled

NFS Protocol Versions

Likewise the protocols have both TCP and UDP enabled.

NFS Transport Protocols

The firewall is also allowing NFS connections. I'm at a bit of a loss as to why the NFS shares have stopped being able to be mounted on ESXi. No major configuration changes have been made as far as I'm aware.

Network Setup

Two physical adapters. One configured for failover, but all traffic under one subnet 192.168.1.0/24 the same as the main LAN. No VLAN's or anything complicated.

Storage Setup

2TB Storage Space Mirror hosted on a Windows Server 2012 R2 server. 3 NFS shares set to read/write for the ESXi host with "All Machines" as read-only.

I've tried restarting the NFS Server service on the Windows Server 2012 R2 box but the problem remains.

Any ideas?

vmware-esxi

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Disable version 4, restart the NFS service and reboot the VMWare box. You only need one of them and definatelly not both for the same share. For further details please have a look here https://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-60/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.vmware.vsphere.storage.doc%2FGUID-011DCC67-9876-4071-AED9-710D1E712E74.html

    As per VMWare documentation you only need to have 1 enabled:

    Make sure that the NFS server exports a particular share as either NFS 3 or NFS 4.1, but does not provide both protocol versions for the same share. This policy needs to be enforced by the server because ESXi does not prevent mounting the same share through different NFS versions.

    • 4

  2. Alex H has the right idea, however I'm adding this to the original question to help anyone else that gets this issue, specifically for NFS on Windows Server 2012 R2. Turns out the error reported by ESXi is indeed correct. Despite having NFS 3.0 or 4.1 enabled via NFS settings properties in Server Manager, ESXi won't mount the NFS shares. Why? Because the critical setting is actually elsewhere...

    In order to find it you must use mmc.exe (Management Console) and open the Services for NFS snap-in go to Server for NFS and right click properties.

    NFS Properties Management Console

    If the tickbox for Enable NFS version 3 support is not ticked, tick it and then click apply and OK. Restart the Server for NFS service. ESXi will then mount the shares again.

    Its interesting that the Version 3 tickbox in the NFS Server Manager settings, doesn't do the same thing, though I'm sure there is a "logical" decision for this by Microsoft.

    Bottom line, this checkbox is pretty much critical for NFS on Windows Server 2012 R2.

    Hope this helps someone, I've been literally trying to solve this for days!

    • 0