At a certain point during the deployment of vCloud Director you have to submit a “NFS mount for transfer file location” as shown below.
In this article I will explain what it’s for and demonstrate how you can configure a NFS share on Windows Server 2019 suitable for vCloud Director.
vCloud Director uses the NFS share as it’s “Transfer Server Storage”.
The Transfer Server Storage has two purposes:
- During transfers, uploads and downloads occupy this storage. When the transfer finishes, the uploads and downloads are removed from the storage. Transfers that make no progress for 60 minutes are marked as expired and cleaned up by the system. Because transferred images can be large, it is a good practice to allocate at least several hundred gigabytes for this use.
- Catalog items in catalogs that are published externally and enable caching of the published content occupy this storage. Items from catalogs that are published externally but do not enable caching do not occupy this storage. If you enable organizations in your cloud to create catalogs that are published externally, you can assume that hundreds or even thousands of catalog items require space on this volume. The size of each catalog item is about the size of a virtual machine in a compressed OVF form.
Source: VMware – Preparing the Transfer Server Storage
You can start small with a 50-100 GB disk to start with, but my would advice would be to start with 500 GB
Install NFS Server role on Windows Server 2019
Before you can add the role to your system, the steps below expect that you already:
- Created a VM with Windows Server 2019 installed
- Added a second disk to the VM
- Created a folder on the second drive which you want to use as the Transfer Server Storage for vCloud Director
Next step is to start the deployment of vCloud Director 10.
Check out the steps here:
PS. Check our other vCloud Director related articles here.
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