I've been involved with a project at work doing some fun things with NFS. Recently due to changes in a available hardware we did a complete refresh of the system. New HBAs, new storage boxes, and due to some internal software confusion we updated the OS on the head from 8.1-R with zpool 15 backported to STABLE.
Our primary client that we were using against this setup was a ESXi 4.1 machine. In a nutshell, it didn't work. Long description is, ZFS would deadlock and any operation on the pool would hang. The ESXi instance would mark the NFS mount as unavailable. I initially thought this could be due to any number of factors, we have new HBAs in the mix, new storage boxes, a new version of zpool, and one test case. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I have a somewhat similar setup at home. FreeBSD 8.1 NFS server, ESXi 4.1 box mounting an NFS exported ZFS filesystem from the FreeBSD box as a datastore. Last night I pulled that box up to STABLE, rebooted it, and a minute after it rebooted the ESXi box marked the NFS datastore as unavailable. I checked the FreeBSD machine and sure enough it hung doing an ls on the zpool. I ran a few tests, and as soon as the ESXi box mounts the NFS export it hangs the ZFS filesystem. If I don't mount it up, the NFS server does fine. Thinking it might be a ZFS problem I moved the mount to a UFS filesystem. While this doesn't cause the box to hang on filesystem operations, the mount goes unavailable. The only other client I have on my network is a FreeBSD 8.1 box, and that has no issues All of this is with the standard NFS server, I haven't yet tested with the experimental server. -- Thanks, Josh Paetzel
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