moving away from freebsd and zfs

[Gil Vidals]

I'm hoping that somebody can help me as I've spent about a month studying
FreeBSD + ZFS to use as a NAS for my VMware ESX environment; however, it
looks like my hopes were completely dashed yesterday as my ZFS server based
on 64-bit i7 CPU with 8 GB of RAM and SSD slogs came crumbling down when I
added a second NFS mount point.

After several hours of research on the crash, it seems that FreeBSD 8.1
won't launch more than one nfsd, no matter what is configured in rc.conf.
(FreeBSD 7.x does launch multiple NFS daemons). So when I added my second
mount point, the CPU load went very high for the RPC services and the second
NFS mount point disconnected, brining down the running VMs.

PROBLEM: only one nfsd
zambia# ps waux | grep nfs
root     1213  0.0  0.0  5804  1508  ??  Is    5:23PM   0:00.02 nfsd: master
(nfsd)
root     1214  0.0  0.0  5804  1588  ??  S     5:23PM   8:06.88 nfsd: server
(nfsd)

The solution described here,
http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=11873 points to compiling a
kernel with these options:

 options NFSD
 options DEVICE_POLLING
 options HZ=1000

The NFSD seems to be what solved the problem for the forum poster, but NFSD
option means that NFSv4 (experimental) is what is running and that isn't
supported by the VMware NFS client, so I can't use it. I don't know what to
do and I would be grateful for any suggestions.

Gil Vidals / VMRacks.com



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