Home > Workload Solutions > SAP > Guides > VMware Virtualized SAP HANA with Dell Storage > SAP HANA shared file system
SAP HANA scale-out scenarios require a shared file system that is mounted on every SAP HANA node within the cluster. The file system stores the installation binary files, configuration files, and trace files. In physical environments, this file system is generally provided as a network file system (NFS) share by storage systems with network-attached storage (NAS) capabilities, such as PowerStore unified, Unity XT unified, and PowerMax and VMAX All Flash with eNAS.
If a NAS array is not available, vSphere with native Linux functionality provides a viable alternative. A Linux virtual machine (non-SAP HANA node) running an NFS server process provides the NFS share, as shown in the following figure:
This process exports a file system that is mounted on all the SAP HANA cluster nodes. Reliability is achieved using vSphere Fault Tolerance.
To set up the NFS server:
/hana_<sid> <fully qualified file server client host name>(rw,sync,no_root_squash,no_subtree_check)
Note: The virtual machine running the NFS server can easily provide multiple SAP HANA share exports for different SAP HANA installations.
To set up the NFS client:
<fully qualified file server host name>:/hana_<sid> /hana/shared nfs hard,intr,nolock,proto=tcp 0 0
$ mkdir -p /hana/shared
$ mount -a
Because the SAP HANA nodes depend on the shared file system, Dell EMC recommends that you turn on the fault-tolerance function for the NFS server virtual machine. To do this, go to the vSphere Web client, highlight the NFS Server virtual machine, and enable Fault Tolerance in the context menu.
Note: The fault-tolerance feature may require additional licenses in your vSphere environment. The feature presents some limitations on the number of virtual CPUs supported per protected virtual machine.
vSphere fault tolerance provides continuous availability for the SAP HANA share during an NFS server failure. vSphere creates a live-shadow virtual-machine instance that is always up to date with the primary virtual machine. If a hardware outage occurs, vSphere automatically triggers failover, ensuring zero downtime for the SAP HANA share and preventing data loss. After failover, vSphere creates a secondary virtual machine to deliver continuous protection for the SAP HANA share.