As a VMware administrator, if you aren’t using Virtual Storage Console (it’s free!) to assist with administering your NetApp storage, you’re missing out on a great tool. It simplifies a lot of tasks through abstraction and a GUI. That being said, I know not everyone has that advantage, especially if you work for an organization where silos are still alive and well.
In order to facilitate best practices when it comes to creating datastores, whether FC/iSCSI LUNs or NFS, I want to publish the settings that VSC uses to create the volumes. As a VMware administrator, you can approach the storage team and ensure the volumes/LUNs/etc. are configured in this manner, or as the storage administrator this is the baseline for VSC configures them.
Remember that these are best practices / recommendations only. They ALWAYS come with the “it depends” caveat…every setup is different, so not all of these may be appropriate for you and your environment.
All of these settings are documented in the VSC Installation and Administration Guide. Additionally, justification and rationale can be found in TR-3749 and TR-4068, the two best practices guides for using vSphere and NetApp together.