zfs, nfs and zil

[Claus Guttesen]

I've setup a server with FreeBSD 8.2 (prerelase) and patched zfs to
ver. 28. The server has 11 disks each 2 TB in raidz2. The performance
is very good and I've got approx. 117 MB/s on plain GB nics using
iscsi.

I'm mounting the FreeBSD-server from a couple of vmware esxi 4.1
servers using nfs, but when there is alot of i/o the server becomes
unresponsive, easily triggered by installing ie. ms-sql. The server
itself is up but is not reachable from the network. When I take the
nic down and up again connection to the network is reestablished
(ip-wise).

A friend of mine has suggested that I disable the zil. The page
http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSTuningGuide says 'Disabling ZIL is not
recommended where data consistency is required (such as database
servers) but will not result in file system corruption.'

Has anyone tried to disable zil and achieved better performance and
still maintain a consistent filesystem?

-- 
regards
Claus

When lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom,
the gentler gamester is the soonest winner.

Shakespeare

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