I think NFS often gets an undue bad reputation. I work at a company which uses NFS at scale and it does the job without too much trouble. NFS is used as the storage for vmware datastores, xen primary storage and also for shared storage mounted between servers.<p>For the latter case, the mounting of these partitions can be automated with config management on the linux servers. You have to be careful with UID&#x27;s and GID&#x27;s but config management helps with this.<p>The filers supplying the NFS storage can be exploited to provide replication to other datacenters,snapshots and also provide redundancy with multiple heads serving the volumes.<p>In the past I&#x27;ve used Fibre channel ( found it overly complex) and iSCSI. iSCSI was fairly straight forward to use, but I&#x27;ve never tried to automate it. I guess there isn&#x27;t a reason you couldn&#x27;t however. For complexity I guess its Fibre&gt;iSCSI&gt;NFS.<p>Performance wise we don&#x27;t have any issues with NFS itself, the bottleneck is sometimes the filer trying to keep up :-)<p>Anyhow, in complex environments, sometimes its good to keep things simple where you can. NFS helps with that, its stable, scalable and the performance is comparable to iSCSI.<p>Removing the need for shared storage on the OS where possible is the ultimate aim though.