Performance tuning is definitely a hot-button issue, however through much experience we've recognized the need to dig in and go beyond general 'best practices' for performance.  In order to get good performance, it's important to understand the whole environment in order to best identify the bottlenecks that exist in the environment.  Once identified there are ways to approach those bottle necks to improve the performance until a new bottle neck is identified.  In this case - it's not only important to know the versions of software, but how many VM's are we talking about?  How many clients?  Are there other workflows on the cluster that we are sensitive of?  How big is the cluster, and what is the hardware makeup?  Do we have SSD's to work with?  What kind of networking exists (10G, 1G?).  And the questions can go on and on.  The true best practice here is simply, when doing a VM workflow - use NFS mounts for the backend data store.  There are some details in the use of snapshots, syncIQ, backups etc. on this storage as well.  But when going beyond that, it is really time to sit down with your account team and walk through the system.  Chris Klosterman is a great resource if available, but I would reach out to your account team as the first step, and determine next steps from there. 
hello, i have a new prject that include VMware over NFS with ISILON i need/want a checklist for performance tuning the NFS & vmware  to achive the best perfromance: i am running vmware 5.5 with nfs v3 and OneFs 7.2   Thank you 
performance tuning guide lines for ISILON with VMware over NFS