moving away from freebsd and zfs

[Marco van Tol]

On Fri, Oct 08, 2010 at 03:00:28AM -0700, Gil Vidals wrote:
> 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.

Check out the '-n' flag to nfsd, which is defaulted to 4 in
/etc/defaults/rc.conf through nfs_server_flags.

> 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)

Try this one with 'ps Hjax | grep nfs'.  The capital H is used to
display threads next to processes.  Add w flags to ps if necessary.

> 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.

I haven't got much experience with nfs4, sorry. :)

Marco

-- 
Most general statements are false, including this one.
- Alexander Dumas