vSphere: Set NFS Advanced Configuration Settings via esxcfg-advcfg

By Arne Fokkema - ICT-Freak.nl

I recently created a post about changing the advanced configuration settings for NFS via PowerCLI. Today I will show you how you can change the advanced configuration settings with the use of esxcfg-advcfg. This is quite useful for kickstart installations.

This is a snippet from my ks.cfg file:

# Set NFS advanced Configuration Settings
/usr/sbin/esxcfg-advcfg -s 30 /Net/TcpipHeapSize
/usr/sbin/esxcfg-advcfg -s 120 /Net/TcpipHeapMax
/usr/sbin/esxcfg-advcfg -s 10 /NFS/HeartbeatMaxFailures
/usr/sbin/esxcfg-advcfg -s 12 /NFS/HeartbeatFrequency
/usr/sbin/esxcfg-advcfg -s 5 /NFS/HeartbeatTimeout
/usr/sbin/esxcfg-advcfg -s 32 /NFS/MaxVolumes

So how do you know what values you need to enter when you want to use this command. Bouke has a html version of the esxcfg manuals on his blog: http://www.jume.nl/esx4man/man8/esxcfg-advcfg.8.html. But this page doesn’t show the information I needed. Open the Advanced Settings screen in the vSphere client.

Open the NFS settings. Let’s use the NFS.MaxVolumes in this example. NFS is the ‘root’ folder the setting in this case MaxVolumes is the child folder. So if you want to change this setting via /usr/sbin/esxcfg-advcfg we need to use the /NFS/MaxVolumes. If you want to know what the current value is, just run the following command from the service console:

/usr/sbin/esxcfg-advcfg –g /NFS/MaxVolumes

This will be the output:

When you change the value to 32 via this command:

/usr/sbin/esxcfg-advcfg -s 32 /NFS/MaxVolumes

This will be the output: