The Network File System (NFS) is a distributed file system protocol originally developed by Sun Microsystems in 1984. An NFS server exports one or more of its file systems, known as shares. An NFS client can mount these exported shares on its own file system. You can perform file actions on this mounted remote file system as if the file system were local.
cinder-volumemanages the mounting of the NFS shares as well as volume creation on the shares. Keep this in mind when planning your OpenStack architecture. If you have one master NFS server, it might make sense to only have onecinder-volumeservice to handle all requests to that NFS server. However, if that single server is unable to handle all requests, more than onecinder-volumeservice is needed as well as potentially more than one NFS server.Because data is stored in a file and not actually on a block storage device, you might not see the same IO performance as you would with a traditional block storage driver. Please test accordingly.
Despite possible IO performance loss, having volume data stored in a file might be beneficial. For example, backing up volumes can be as easy as copying the volume files.
![[Note]](../common/images/admon/note.png)
Note Regular IO flushing and syncing still stands.
