FreeNAS and ESXi 4 slow through NFS

YES!!!! That's it. The files rocks in 20sec. But I read every time ZIL to disable is not a good idea.
 
I'm glad it worked for you. To bad I couldnt get it to work before I already moved everything over to my Windows NFS shares.
 
I maked this steps:
1. mount -u /
2. opened /boot/loader.inf and puted this on the last line:
vfs.zfs.zil_disable="1"
3. closed the file
4. rebooted the system
 
Disabling zil is indeed not recommended. If the host and/or the NAS crash during a write, the esxi guest can lose data or even suffer corruption. If you have both on a UPS, this is unlikely though. It's up to you to assess the risk and how far you want to go to mitigate it. Putting a decent SSD in as a ZIL device helps the slowness a lot.
 
Hi

Thanks for the information. Both machines are on a UPS. I use the NAS primarily for backup of the VMs. It is not intended to run guests.
I have only 2 GB RAM. Should I put in more RAM to solve this issues? Make this sense?
Exist this poor performance issues between ESXi and NFS on other systems with ZFS an ZIL?
 
Extra ram will only help as a read cache. I'm not sure I understand your second question.
 
I have to ask... What type of hardware is this running on and what is your Zpool configuration? I've got an all-in-one server running Napp-It on OpenIndiana. 4x 1tb drives set up as 2 mirrors. I saturate Gigabit and ESXi performance is great. I didn't have to disable a ZIL either. I'm curious why people get such lousy write performance on their ZFS setups. I haven't had to disable Sync writes either...
 
I dont think hardware performance is the issue here. I had mine running on an Atom setup, but CPU graphs showed it NEVER goes above 5%. I was getting write speeds of <1MB/sec. I think even a Pentium3 could handle that load. Also considering I'm getting 90MB/sec READS.

I was right in the middle of considering OI w/ Napp-it before I decided to just use Windows NFS shares.
 
I wasn't thinking so much the CPU as much as amount of memory, disk controllers, ZFS configuration, etc.
 
Do you have it set up as a RAIDZ or mirrors or? How many drives are in use? What are their sizes and makes?
 
I have a secondary pool that is 3x 2TB Samsung drives. When I get a minute, I'll try running a VM off them and see if I get similar behavior. Admittedly I have only tried my mirrored set for running VMs. I'm curious whether the drives reporting a 512 block size instead of the real 4k will matter... Will keep you posted.
 
Thanis so much. While completely after the fact for me now it might help when/if I need to upgrade this thing past 5 drives. Plus this is a problem I've Googler on the net with freenas that doesn't have a solution. Other people may find this helpful.
 
I have 2 x 3TB (mirror).
I think this is only a problem with ESXi and FreeNAS. I have an other linux machine and the can write with normal performance to the NFS-Share on the FreeNAS (with enabled ZIL).I hope the next release of FreeNAS fix this issues.
 
I wanted to try it with iSCSI but I've left it as it's work with disabled ZIL.
I found an easier way to disable ZIL. With the Tunables in the GUI.

1. Add Tunable:
Variable: vfs.zfs.zil_disable
Value:1

2. Restart FreeNAS

It's work also fine and you must not edit the loader.conf.
 
chaosranger said:
I wanted to try it with iSCSI but I've left it as it's work with disabled ZIL.
I found an easier way to disable ZIL. With the Tunables in the GUI.

1. Add Tunable:
Variable: vfs.zfs.zil_disable
Value:1

2. Restart FreeNAS

It's work also fine and you must not edit the loader.conf.
Click to expand...

nice fine, thanks for sticking around the forum and following up with this problem.
 
I'm bumping this because I had to reinstall FreeNAS as the Windows NFS shares would randomly disconnect for no reason.

I did the above post with the tunable option, rebooted, and now its not coming back up. *sigh*

So I'm still fishing for a solution to this.
 
I too can now verify that placing the two lines of code in the startup config solves this problem.

I get 109.4MB/s read and 66.4MB/s write. Was hoping for better write speeds.
 
lopoetve said:
Youre still worrying about throughput. Worry more about iops
Click to expand...

Yes thats true. But its a far better improvement over the 1MB/s write speed I was getting.

I'm also worried about speed a little more as this NAS is hosting things other than just VM's.
 
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