Mount External Datastores to VMware on Nutanix | Nutanix Community
Skip to main content

It’s unclear to me whether or not it is supported to mount datastores, whether NFS or iSCSI, from external sources onto VMware hosts running on Nutanix for VMDK storage for VMs. I apologize if this has been answered before or clearly stated in docs somewhere.

Hi @zdurham 

As I know it is not supported to add external storage to Nutanix cluster, you have options to clean up some space, or scale out or up your Nutanix clusters.


I can’t imagine it being recommended but you can technically mount external sources in VMWare or in the VM itself but you won’t be getting any of the Nutanix storage fabric advantages. Note that you can get ‘storage only’ nodes to boost your Nutanix capacity.

I used to run a Windows file server VM with local storage on Nutanix for performance to profiles and home drives, but iSCSI volume mapped out to a cheap NAS box for the main document share.