I upgraded to 9.2.1.6-Release this weekend, and while I was at it, did some additional ad-hoc maintenance in the lab. I noticed one oddity that I haven't experienced before.
Essentially, the ESXi hosts weren't able to mount the NFS share on the newly-upgraded FreeNAS box. The ESXi hosts could ping each other and the FreeNAS server.. and vice-versa, but it wouldn't mount. VMware showed the NFS share as invalid/inaccessible/unmounted (or something like that). I have a handful of VMs stored on this NFS share and they were all temporarily orphaned/inaccessible.
I ended up tracking the problem down to a non-working DNS server. (Actually, the DNS Server's datastore was hosted on the FreeNAS box, so I had a bit of a chicken/egg problem). I was able to get a DNS server up and running - and a quick stop/start of the NFS service in FreeNAS and everything came back to life.
I'm pretty sure I've done similar maintenance in the past and don't remember DNS being required for an NFS connection to be successful. This is pretty easy to test. Change the DNS server in FreeNAS to something non-existent and then reboot. When it comes back up, ESXi won't be able to mount an NFS datastore.
When I get some time, I'll try and give it a go with an older FreeNAS version. Just wanted to see if this is expected behavior.
Essentially, the ESXi hosts weren't able to mount the NFS share on the newly-upgraded FreeNAS box. The ESXi hosts could ping each other and the FreeNAS server.. and vice-versa, but it wouldn't mount. VMware showed the NFS share as invalid/inaccessible/unmounted (or something like that). I have a handful of VMs stored on this NFS share and they were all temporarily orphaned/inaccessible.
I ended up tracking the problem down to a non-working DNS server. (Actually, the DNS Server's datastore was hosted on the FreeNAS box, so I had a bit of a chicken/egg problem). I was able to get a DNS server up and running - and a quick stop/start of the NFS service in FreeNAS and everything came back to life.
I'm pretty sure I've done similar maintenance in the past and don't remember DNS being required for an NFS connection to be successful. This is pretty easy to test. Change the DNS server in FreeNAS to something non-existent and then reboot. When it comes back up, ESXi won't be able to mount an NFS datastore.
When I get some time, I'll try and give it a go with an older FreeNAS version. Just wanted to see if this is expected behavior.