Error During Copy To FreeNAS ZFS

[YTKColumba]

Hello, I am having a little problem copying files to FreeNAS ZFS volume. Below are my spec for my machine.

OS: ESXi 5 (FreeNAS as VM)
CPU: 3930K (2 Logical CPU @ 3.2GHz)
Memory: 8GB
Hard Drive: 9 Disk ZFS RAID-Z2 (9 Datastore on VM and 2TB each, FreeNAS read it @ 13.6 TB)
FreeNAS Version: 8.0.2

Pretty much FreeNAS is a new install and I left most settings to default (new to FreeNAS). I only created the ZFS volume and share it as CIFS.

I am trying to copy about 12GB of information (about 50 files) at once to FreeNAS and sometime I would encounter an error stating drive not available.

- If I hit "Try Again" it would eventually finish copying all the files.
- If I copy small chunk at a time, there would be no error.

I took a look at look at the Performance on the vSphere Client, and it looks like FreeNAS hit pretty much max resource during the copy of the 12GB of files. So I was wondering if I need to allocate more resource to the machine. Or if there are any settings I need to configure to fix this? Or if there are anyway to cap resource usable to a certain point?

Apologies for the long post, I just started to use FreeNAS.

Thanks in advance.

 

[praecorloth]

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that perhaps the added overhead of virtualization is causing troubles. Is there a reason you're running FreeNAS in a VM?

 

[William Grzybowski]

Did you install the x64 version?

How manu vCPUs did you assing to the vm? (all of them? if so, try using a single one)

 

[YTKColumba]

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that perhaps the added overhead of virtualization is causing troubles. Is there a reason you're running FreeNAS in a VM?

It might be visualization overhead because I looked at the "Performance" tab of ESXi and it max out CPU during copy.

Did you install the x64 version?

How manu vCPUs did you assing to the vm? (all of them? if so, try using a single one)

I've assigned 2 vCPU and 8GB of RAM

 

[YTKColumba]

I seem to have solved the problem if anyone is interested.

Seem like if you want to install FreeNAS as a VM and have it share drives on the ESXi Hypervisor, you have to use Raw Device Mapping (RDM).

These two links explains how to do RDM:

http://vm-help.com/esx40i/SATA_RDMs.php
http://blog.davidwarburton.net/2010/10/25/rdm-mapping-of-local-sata-storage-for-esxi/

It seem like the problem was pretty much virtualization overhead because I had virtual disk on top of virtual datastore that is on top of the physical disk.
One of my professor told me that when virtualizing this many layer could affect the clock sync on the transfer...

But after I RDM to map the drive, everything seem to work fine.