New freenas build and questions

Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.
Apr 2, 2015
48
1
8
46
hey there,

I'm building a freenas box to use for backup.
Hardwarewise, it's a single xeon L5630, 12 gb ram, intel rs2wc040 hba (drives exported as jbod), 12 x1TB drives (mix of wd blacks, seagate CS, hgst).

I'll be using this as storage for a veeam b&r virtual machine, running windows 7 ultimate.

i wanted to mount the storage in the vm as NFS, but i'm having some performance issues. I do believe the nfs implementation in windows 7 is just bad. I'm getting 30 MB/s read and write from the windows machine to the freenas box using nfs in windows.
If i use iscsi, i get the full gigabit speed (100+ MB/s). Also, if i mount the freenas dataset in the esxi host as NFS, and then create a virtual disk on this datastore for the vm, i also get 100+ MB/s speeds, which means nfs speed is ok, just not windows7 implementation.

I would rather use NFS because i also want to use the storage for other backups, and creating a volume to use with iscsi simply fragments the space available.

What would you recommend in my case?

Anyone used another windows version that has a better nfs implementation? Maybe 2008 server, or win 8.1?
If all have this issue, i will use iscsi, but i was thinking of going with a sparse file for it, any issues with that?
 

EffrafaxOfWug

Radioactive Member
Feb 12, 2015
1,394
511
113
Windows' support for NFS is abysmal, frankly I'm amazed you got 30MB/s out of it :) There's a couple of projects offering NFS clients for windows such as nekodrive but from my admittedly brief experience they're also slow and buggy.

Any reason CIFS isn't on the cards?
 

whitey

Moderator
Jun 30, 2014
2,766
868
113
41
I beg to differ and it really does indeed make me cringe to say this but Server 2012's implementation of NFS (server/client) is 'pretty good'...yuck did I just say that? I forget if they cleaned up that SFU garbage in Server 2008 or if it was a major re-write to the new stg stack but they even support NFS 4.1 server to test w/ vSphere I believe which is more than I can say abt the NFS4.1/pNFS movement across the open source platforms (all over the place on feature set/code implementations).

What kind of world are we livin' in? haha i just feel like I spoke straight up blasphemy coming from a *nix guy.

WARNING: I did not test this myself but saw a buddy of mine I help w/ his co-lo VDI gig do this for temp swing space...I cringed at first when he told me about what he did/used but he was in a pinch and I was not avail/he had limited HW, it worked out ok if memory serves me correct but I'd be telling a fib if I said I had raw throughput/iops numbers but it ran some core infra VM's during a cutover fine mounted in as a NFS datastore from that Server 2012 box. SMH
 
Apr 2, 2015
48
1
8
46
I gave cifs a try, and while the speed was ok (wire speed basically) for some reason veeam is unable to.use it. It gives an error when trying to setup the repository on the cifs share. It works just fine when i browse it from windows, or even mount it as a networkd drive. So i gave up on it and switched to iscsi.
I will setup a server 2012 vm and give nfs another try, maybe it works ok.
 
Apr 2, 2015
48
1
8
46
So i installed a trial windows 2012 server. The nfs client is indeed better than the one included in win7, but far from wirespeed still. To summarize:
win7 NFS 30MB/s
win7 CIFS 90-100 MB/s
win7 iscsi 100-110 MB/s
ESXI NFS 100-110 MB/s
win2012 server NFS 50-60 MB/s

So i'll stick to iscsi for now.