Mike Trello's Blog

Background
I had been successfully backing up to a NFS Datastore on my backup server running XP for the past year. Hardware issues began to crop up on the server (which was a hodgepodge of parts, most of which were at least seven years old) which necessitated a rebuild. A new motherboard, CPU and 8GB of Ram were swapped in. The case and power supply were newer and perfectly fine. The older 300GB drives were taken offline and two drives (1TB and 2TB) were repurposed from elsewhere in the network.

I installed Windows 2008 R2 on the machine. This is where I knew my existing NFS connection directions would need to be adjusted. This is because Microsoft decided to remove User Name Mapping from this server version. It took me a number of tries and missteps to get the share connected properly so I hope this abbreviated post helps save someone time.

What I did
Step one was to follow this post’s directions. It is excellent but I still could not get the NFS datastore to mount through vSphere. I then went back and made sure Everyone was granted full permissions on all tabs on the 2008 share. Apparently I missed one as suddenly I could mount the share, except it showed as zero space. Hmmm.

After some googling, I found this post. There was one item that solved my problem immediately.

“Go into your local security policy, and make sure under Security Settings -> Local Polcicies -> Security Options, that you have ‘Network access: Let Everyone permissions apply to anonymous users’ set to Enabled. Reboot your server, and try again.”

Now I saw the NFS share and could browse it.

I ran a ghettoVCB script to backup a virtual machine as a test. It began to run properly and completed in a reasonable time period. Excellent. Hope this helps someone.

Filed under:
Backups, Esxi, NFS by mtrello_Blog