is NFS production-ready ?

[Charles Swiger]

On Apr 10, 2006, at 3:26 PM, dima wrote:
> First, searching through the archives I'm about to say "No".
>
> My goal is to provide NFS service to many FreeBSD clients sharing  
> the exports. The usage pattern appears to be "many reads and not as  
> much writes".  The deployment might look like the following: a SAN  
> and 2 NFS servers sharing its LUNs. The servers use hot-standby  
> scheme provided by CARP (or its equivalent). Many FreeBSD clients  
> would share their exports. I wish servers ran FreeBSD also since  
> it's the best known OS for the company administrators.

The NFS protocol is stateless, but most clients doing writes will use  
a locking mechanism which is not stateless.  In other words, you can  
easily cluster read-only NFS shares, but this is not true of read- 
write shares.

> The majors are:
> - no data corruption
> - no hangs (this seems to be the largest problem with current  
> implementation)
> - client retry on failure

These two suggest you might be happier with Samba/CIFS.

> - a reasonable read speed
>
> My questions:
> 1. NFS/UDP (it's stateless!) is considered to be "evil". Why  
> (assuming I can grant a balanced network bandwidth)?

Dunno, NFS over UDP works just fine.

> 2. NFS server implementation seems to be very buggy. Any success  
> stories? Well, NFS servers can easily run Linux, Solaris etc.

NFS works reasonably well on FreeBSD, modulo rpc.lockd.  Solaris  
probably has the best NFS implementation available, and would be a  
better fileserver platform than almost anything else you've  
mentioned.  NFS on Linux is probably more buggy than NFS on FreeBSD,  
from what I've seen.

> 3. Is at least implementation of NFS client (either kernel-side or  
> user-space) stable enough for production use? Client OS replacement  
> is impossible (hardly suitable, really) in my project.

NFS on FreeBSD is stable but perhaps not bullet-proof.

> PS: The competing options are either SMB or CODA for now. Any other  
> suggestions?
> PPS: I'd be happy to hear that FreeBSD supports at least one really  
> clustered FS (proprietary ones are also OK). But I think I wouldn't :(

I think you can get some amount of the Veritas suite for FreeBSD...

-- 
-Chuck