I'm having numerous problems with my freenas box lately, and I'm going to try to post my troubleshooting steps as I go. Hopefully this will help me to keep track of what I've done, and maybe help someone else along the way too. Plus, maybe if I make a bonehead mistake or overlook something, and extra set of eyes will help keep me on track.
My current setup is as follows:
Hardware Specs:
GA-MA770-UD3P Mobo
AMDPOhenom II x4 945 CPU
16GB of RAM
WD20EARS 2.0TB Drives (x3)
1x onboard Gigabit NIC
2x Intel e1000 Gigabit NIC (PCI)
Software:
VMWare ESXi 5.0.0 running on hardware
VM Specs:
1 CPU / 8GB RAM allocated
OS: FreeNAS 8.2.0 RC1 x64
NIC: Intel e1000 network interface card
CIFS Shares with integrated Active Directory for Windows Domain
3 vmdk files were created on each of the EARS drives and presented to the VM as datastores*. These are setup in a 3-disk raidz vol.
Network Specs:
Cisco gigabit network
Intel e1000 NIC in ESXi host
Windows Active Directory Domain
Current Problems:
Extremely slow transfer rates (~1MB/s, as reported in Windows).
Network Drives become unavailable during large transfers.
My transfers have been from a USB3.0 drive connected to my desktop, which is also has a gigabit connection. I have also tried connecting this USB3.0 drive to the ESXi server, attaching it to another windows machine hosted on ESXi, and attempting the transfer from there. This essentially rules out my desktop and network, as everything is internal to the ESXi box. I have a 3 disk RAID array in my desktop that I plan to do some testing with, that way I know it's not a USB bottleneck causing the problems.
The ESXi box has had relatively little use over the last year, as I have been deployed. There were a couple hardware problems that I walked my wife through fixing, and it was accessed every couple days with very little stress put on it. When I left a year ago, it was running well (though probably not optimized) and would easily give 35-55MB of sustained transfer from 5400-7200RPM single SATA drives. Although a little on the low side, this was acceptable with the inherent problems with my setup. I can't get even close to that now, so the goal is to figure out what changed and is causing my problem.
If anything is a glaring problem, or any other quick recommendations as to what I should check, please hit me up.
* I know that having an underlying file system for ZFS is not optimal, so I'm considering moving this box to its own hardware so FreeNAS can have low level access to the disks.
My current setup is as follows:
Hardware Specs:
GA-MA770-UD3P Mobo
AMDPOhenom II x4 945 CPU
16GB of RAM
WD20EARS 2.0TB Drives (x3)
1x onboard Gigabit NIC
2x Intel e1000 Gigabit NIC (PCI)
Software:
VMWare ESXi 5.0.0 running on hardware
VM Specs:
1 CPU / 8GB RAM allocated
OS: FreeNAS 8.2.0 RC1 x64
NIC: Intel e1000 network interface card
CIFS Shares with integrated Active Directory for Windows Domain
3 vmdk files were created on each of the EARS drives and presented to the VM as datastores*. These are setup in a 3-disk raidz vol.
Network Specs:
Cisco gigabit network
Intel e1000 NIC in ESXi host
Windows Active Directory Domain
Current Problems:
Extremely slow transfer rates (~1MB/s, as reported in Windows).
Network Drives become unavailable during large transfers.
My transfers have been from a USB3.0 drive connected to my desktop, which is also has a gigabit connection. I have also tried connecting this USB3.0 drive to the ESXi server, attaching it to another windows machine hosted on ESXi, and attempting the transfer from there. This essentially rules out my desktop and network, as everything is internal to the ESXi box. I have a 3 disk RAID array in my desktop that I plan to do some testing with, that way I know it's not a USB bottleneck causing the problems.
The ESXi box has had relatively little use over the last year, as I have been deployed. There were a couple hardware problems that I walked my wife through fixing, and it was accessed every couple days with very little stress put on it. When I left a year ago, it was running well (though probably not optimized) and would easily give 35-55MB of sustained transfer from 5400-7200RPM single SATA drives. Although a little on the low side, this was acceptable with the inherent problems with my setup. I can't get even close to that now, so the goal is to figure out what changed and is causing my problem.
If anything is a glaring problem, or any other quick recommendations as to what I should check, please hit me up.
* I know that having an underlying file system for ZFS is not optimal, so I'm considering moving this box to its own hardware so FreeNAS can have low level access to the disks.