FreeNAS 11 freezes when using NFS shares from ESXI Host

[kanid99]

As the title explains - on my ESXI Host (6.5) I have mounted an NFS share and an iSCSI link from the FreeNAS box. I have some VMs in the NFS share folder that I wanted to move into the iscsi datastore to run my VMs from there -but as soon as I try to copy files on ESXI from one mount to the other , FreeNAS locks up fully and needs a hard reset.

My SMB shares are working and have worked fine under heavy loads for a about two years. I do not have any alerts on FreeNAS of a failing drive(s). Im guessing its possible its RAM on the FreeNAS host but I wouldve thought Id see other indicators of this before now. Any thoughts ? Are there any logs that may indicate the cause of the freezeup ? Again, ONLY when using NFS shares do I get this issue.

 

[kanid99]

Im not at home and this happened while working remotely - so Im assuming when I get home and I turn on the monitor for my FreeNAS host I could have some errors displayed there. This all sounds like hardware to me.

 

[Stux]

FWIW, doing the exact same thing worked fine for me :-/

How much RAM does FreeNAS have? Is FreeNAS virtualized?

 

[kanid99]

FreeNAS is not virtualized at this point (though that is the end goal) - it runs in its own machine, 24GB of ram. Its working NOW without issue which makes me suspect a RAM issue or a disk issue that isnt obvious.

 

[Stux]

FreeNAS is not virtualized at this point (though that is the end goal) - it runs in its own machine, 24GB of ram. Its working NOW without issue which makes me suspect a RAM issue or a disk issue that isnt obvious.

Using iSCSI and NFS from my virtualized FreeNAS I found I needed to use 24GB to not throttle performance.

I was wondring if perhaps you had an ECC event?

 

[kanid99]

No ECC event - this time when it froze I was here to look at the local monitor - FreeNAS is not frozen, but it seems to have just dropped the network interface. So Im thinking something in my NIC doesnt like what Im doing.

 

[Stux]

Have you got MTU 9000 enabled?

 

[kanid99]

No, Ive had issues in the past with jumbo frames so I dont turn it on in most cases. Im pretty confident that its the NIC built into this motherboard. Its a consumer board with a junky realtek NIC so my gut says that it just isnt liking the load at all and the driver breaks.

 

[Stux]

No, Ive had issues in the past with jumbo frames so I dont turn it on in most cases. Im pretty confident that its the NIC built into this motherboard. Its a consumer board with a junky realtek NIC so my gut says that it just isnt liking the load at all and the driver breaks.

Yes.

You should consider adding an Intel nic.

 

[kanid99]

Im planning to retire the FreeNAS host physical machine and migrate it to a VM in my esxi host, which should resolve it (I hope).

 

[ggoosen]

Keen to follow and hear how this goes, im trying to setup FreeNas on an esxi vm platform and worried about this thread.