is NFS production-ready ?

[Zane C.B.]

On Mon, 10 Apr 2006 23:26:40 +0400
dima <_pppp at mail.ru> wrote:

> First, searching through the archives I'm about to say "No".
> 
> My goal is to provide NFS service to many FreeBSD clients sharing the
> exports. The usage pattern appears to be "many reads and not as much
> writes". The deployment might look like the following: a SAN and 2
> NFS servers sharing its LUNs. The servers use hot-standby scheme
> provided by CARP (or its equivalent). Many FreeBSD clients would
> share their exports. I wish servers ran FreeBSD also since it's the
> best known OS for the company administrators.
> 
> The majors are:
> - no data corruption
> - no hangs (this seems to be the largest problem with current
> implementation)
> - client retry on failure
> - a reasonable read speed
> 
> My questions:
> 1. NFS/UDP (it's stateless!) is considered to be "evil". Why
> (assuming I can grant a balanced network bandwidth)? 2. NFS server
> implementation seems to be very buggy. Any success stories? Well, NFS
> servers can easily run Linux, Solaris etc. 3. Is at least
> implementation of NFS client (either kernel-side or user-space)
> stable enough for production use? Client OS replacement is impossible
> (hardly suitable, really) in my project.
> 
> PS: The competing options are either SMB or CODA for now. Any other
> suggestions?
> 
> PPS: I'd be happy to hear that FreeBSD supports at least one really
> clustered FS (proprietary ones are also OK). But I think I wouldn't :(

I have been using NFS on FreeBSD for years and never have a had a
problem. As long as the network is sound it works nicely.