Are there any free NFS clients for Windows 7?
Solution 1:
Check this open source project:
Nekodrive
https://github.com/nekoni/nekodrive
The target of this project is to implement NFS (Network File System v2/v3/v4.1) over the Dokan user file system for windows. This let you mount very easily an NFS export as a local windows drive. You don't need any NFS windows client to access the NFS remote export, you can just use microsoft explorer. The current version doesn't support NFS v4.1 yet.
Solution 2:
As long as I understand the question, you should be able to use Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX. You can get them here:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=274
Informative Edit: Download in link is no longer available. 2017-Nov-05
Solution 3:
As only a last resort I suppose it would be possible to install a linux in a Virtualization environment hosted by the Windows workstation, ie. Virtualbox- which would then provide a shared storage that the guest would have mounted as an NFS volume.
I imagine it would help considerably to have a seperate network interface for the guest to mount the share through.
In other words:
Install Virtualbox to Windows desktop.
Install TinyCore to Virtualbox.
Configure TinyCore's environment to include a shared storage directory.
Install nfs-common to TinyCore.
Mount desired NFS share from TinyCore.
6a. Either point the Virtualbox share to where TinyCore mounts the NFS share to reach it from the Windows host,
or
6b. Mount the NFS mount to the directory Virtualbox is providing to the Windows host.
As I said, last resort.
Solution 4:
There's an NFS 4.1 Windows client open source project from UMichigan, but you have to build it yourself and I suspect it would need some testing before deployment in a production environment.
Solution 5:
I'd be hesitant of running one that isn't Microsoft's or a very well tested solution - especially for any "serious" sharing (beyond simple file copy).
Realize NFS is a very powerful network protocol, more so than most people use it for. For example storing virtual machine images on NFS works fine, survives a server outage (regardless of length) without losing data, etc.
This covers why it's not "easy" - http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2006-10/msg01074.html
A better question mayb e why not just use samba on the nfs server to expose the shares via smb? I ask because you make it sound like the two servers are unrelated. Samba should be fairly easy to support on the same machine.