Agreed, NFS is fine when combined with proper ZFS setup for it. Googling around will quickly yield all information on a proper information and setup for ZFS as an NFS server.

Two quick links that do a good job of catching the pertinent details:

http://constantin.glez.de/blog/2010/07/solaris-zfs-synchronous-writes-and-zil-explained

http://christopher-technicalmusings.blogspot.com/2010/09/zfs-and-nfs-performance-with-zil.html



Simply throwing together a test setup and playing with your intended use case and the various combinations (EG: MD/HWRAID,LVM,XFS,EXT4,ZFS)is the best thing I can suggest.



Also do take a look into data I have posted on the mailing lists as well. I have spent an extensive amount of time making sure Linux ZFS + NFS works smooth with development and VM storage we use to build and test HELiOS.



I will note also that some early work with BTRFS (OEL UEK Kernel) has yielded promising performance and stability results recently as well.



- Chris



-----Original Message-----

From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Graham Allan

Sent: Thursday, July 25, 2013 11:57 AM

To: Paul Robert Marino

Cc: scientific-linux-users

Subject: Re: Large filesystem recommendation



It's not so bad if you build the system taking these things into account (much easier if you wait long enough to read about others' experiences :-). We built our BSD ZFS systems using inexpensive Intel 313 SSDs for the log devices. I can't say that they're the best possible choice, opinions vary all over the map, but the box is currently happily accepting 2Gbps continuous NFS writes, which seems pretty decent.



Graham



On 7/24/2013 5:36 PM, Paul Robert Marino wrote:

> ZFS is a performance nightmare if you plan to export it via NFS 

> because of a core design conflict with how NFS locking and the ZIL 

> journal in ZFS. Its not just a linux issue it effects Solaris and BSD 

> as well. My only experience with ZFS was on a Solaris NFS server and 

> we had to get a dedicated flash backed ram drive for the ZIL to fix 

> our performance issues, and let me tell you sun charged us a small fortune for the card.

> Aside from that most of the cool features are available in XFS if you 

> dive deep enough into the documentation though most of them like multi 

> disk spanning can be handled now by LVM or MD but are at least in my 

> opinion handled better by hardware raid. Though I will admit the being 

> able to move your journal to a separate faster volume to increase 

> performance is very cool and that's only a feature I've seen in XFS and ZFS.