Solaris writing to Windows NFS Server - poor performance

ChrisD. · 28 Aug 2015 at 11:34

I've got a Solaris 10 machine and I need to copy the Oracle DB backups to a Windows NFS share. The share is running on Windows Server 2008 R2. Read performance is limited by network speed as you'd expect, however I'm seeing a bottleneck of around 500 kb/s when writing.

Unfortunately installing any other apps on either box is out of the question as is using smb as the client built into Solaris 10 is terrible.

nfsstat -rc doesn't show any timouts or a high number of badcalls (<1%), the NFS log in Windows doesn't show much apart from lots and lots of 'write operation successful'.

nfsstat - shows nothing untoward.

Both are VMs and both are on the same network and ESXi 5.5 host.

Yamahahahahaha · 28 Aug 2015 at 21:25

1) Check NFS Synchronous writes on both ends. Make sure it's off / async writes.

2) Check volume write performance on the Windows box using another protocol - just to confirm underlying storage isn't the problem.

ChrisD. · 29 Aug 2015 at 15:05

Will take a look on Monday, thanks.

blueboy2001 · 31 Aug 2015 at 23:13

Check the mount options you're using in Solaris. Oracle recommend specific mount options for different purposes.

How are you writing the backups out - eg. directly to the NFS share through RMAN, or just a cold file copy?

My understanding was that NFS server in 2008 R2 was not very good and NFS was one of the significant improvements in 2012.

ChrisD. · 1 Sep 2015 at 08:01

I've tried various mount options, none seem to have improved things so far. I've written a shell script to copy the files, so RMAN backs up the db and then I use a mv command to put them on the NFS share.

blueboy2001 · 2 Sep 2015 at 21:08

Which NIC types are you using for the VM's? If you've got any of them set to E1000, try switching VMXNET and see if that improves things.

ChrisD. · 2 Sep 2015 at 23:15

Yeah they are E1000, will try switching but I'm not sure that's the issue.

I created a smb share on the Solaris server and mounted it on Windows, saw 120+ MB/s transfer rate so I'm pretty convinced it's something to do with NFS performance.

Quartz · 2 Sep 2015 at 23:36

S2KIP said:
Both are VMs and both are on the same network and ESXi 5.5 host.

Just to clarify, are you saying that they're both VMs on the same ESXi host? Or that both are VMs on (different) ESXi hosts on the same network?

ChrisD. · 2 Sep 2015 at 23:38

Yes, same host. For testing I created a new 2008 R2 machine on the same host (to eliminate any physical networking issues). The host has local storage, where both VMs are stored.

ChrisD. · 3 Sep 2015 at 09:24

Oh, just to add. I tried it to another server, a 2012R2 physical Hyper V host we have, same issue. So it's something on the Solaris end to do with NFS tuning I think.

anything I don't mind · 3 Sep 2015 at 15:46

Why not just use SMB from solaris? Is that not an option? Never used solaris.

ChrisD. · 3 Sep 2015 at 15:48

anything I don't mind said:
Why not just use SMB from solaris? Is that not an option? Never used solaris.

Unfortunately there is no option to permanently mount an smb share within Solaris 10 as it ships.

ChrisD. · 21 Sep 2015 at 15:48

Looks like it's the e1000g adapter. If I install the vmxnet3 adapter I get performance as you'd expect.