The Last Octet

The other day I was having datastore naming issues with my lab setup (Datastore Rename (1)). I've since done further testing and I think I been able to eliminate the automatic datastore rename problem. Before I explain how I fixed the problem, I should share how the lab was configured originally.

The picture below is a representation of the original lab configuration.

In the picture above you can see that each ESX host is directly connected to the NAS server via crossover cables (the NAS server is equipped with serveral gigabit NIC's - one dedicated to each host server). Configured in this manner it seems that VirtualCenter is unable to determine that the hosts share mutual NFS datastores. I find it interesting that NFS datastores are handled this way in this configuration. I've configured the lab like this previously with iSCSI (and a VI3 environment) and the hosts and VirtualCenter handled the configuration properly.

Re-cabling the environment in a more traditional manner and adjusting the IP scheme, I was able to eliminate the datastore rename scenario. The image below depicts the properly functioning lab configuration.