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ESXi reports "All Paths Down" for ReadyNAS hosted NFS share
Hiya - looking for some feedback from the community on an issue I'm seeing. Thanks in advance for any insights. Some background: We're using two ReadyNAS 3200's to host virtual machines via NFS. ESXi hosts are running ESXi 5.1. The ReadyNAS units are running 4.2.19, and have "adaptive load balancing" set on the NICs. Issue: I'm seeing some of the ESXi hosts report that NFS shares enter "All Paths Down" state for 6-7 seconds, before exiting this status and reconnecting. This happens for BOTH ReadyNAS units, and on 9 ESXi hosts - with no solid pattern on which host is impacted OR which ReadyNAS shows as "All Paths Down". It DOES appear to be related to the current load on the ReadyNAS. For example, if I start a backup job, I can expect to see this error on 3-4 ESXi hosts at least. I believe this has been happening for awhile without anyone noticing - but it caused a HUGE issue 2 weeks ago, when one of the ReadyNAS units entered/exited "All Paths Down" state nonstop while backups were running. (I opened a support case with Netgear and submitted the logs but they could not explain why this happened.) Current theory: From what I can tell, adaptive load balancing causes the ReadyNAS to change what MAC address (and NIC) is receiving traffic for a certain percentage of the overall traffic. It's my guess that when I run backups (or do anything else load intensive), the ReadyNAS attempts to load balance some of the traffic going to the ESXi hosts. The resulting change to the MAC address being reported to the ESXi host causes ESXi to report "all paths down" briefly before the new MAC address/NIC resolves correctly. The issue we experienced must have been due to a glitch or bug in the load balancing, which caused the ReadyNAS to fail to "stabilize" the load balancing correctly. I was only able to stabilize the unit by power cycling it. Questions: 1.) Does this sound like a plausible theory? My current thinking is I should disable load balancing and go to active-backup configuration to see if this resolves the issue. 2.) Will a firmware update resolve this issue? I reviewed the firmware patch notes and none of them mention NFS stability with NIC teaming.
can't negotiate 10gigabit connection
I am unable to make the readynas 4200 negotiate with the netgear prosafe XS708E at 10gigabit. With cat5e and cat6 cable in the status of the interface I only see: Online / Mbit / Half-Duplex I am not able to turn on Jumbo Frames (while the mtu is set to 9000) From the switch I see that the port is negotiating at 1000. I am working on interface2 (using interface1 as console). any ideas ? thanks Giacomo
ReadyNAS 2100 - Deleting a large file on the NFS
Regarding the issue detailed: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1035332 Basically the issue is that when a large file is deleted/removed from a NFS datastore on the NAS, the datastore becomes inactive and we get an error 'No such file or directory' (eventually). When the datastore becomes active again, we find that the file is deleted. According to the KB the workaround is to increase the timeout but before having to do that (given that the host has to be rebooted), is it possible to resolve the issue on the NAS?
ReadyNAS Pro 4.2.24, iSCSI and VMware vSphere ESXi 5.5
I just upgraded to VMware vSphere ESXi 5.5 and I tried to access an iSCSI target (LUN) that was originally created with ESXi 5.0. I added the new initiator IQN to the access control list for the iSCSI target on the ReadyNAS Pro, which is running RAIDiator 4.2.24, but ESXI did not see the device or the datastore. I then deleted the ISCSI target and created a new one, but ESXi still did not see the device. Oddly enough, VMware does show the target name in the iSCSI initiator properties. I've refreshed, rescanned, rebooted (both sides) several times. Is RAIDiator going to need an update for ESXi 5.5?4200 iSCSI performance solved getting 100 MBs per nic
I was never really happy with the performance I was getting on the Readynas 4200 about 95 MBs read. It was OK but not great for having multiple nics. So I finally did some optimization this weekend. The trick was to turn off teaming on the Readynas and have each NIC on a separate Vlan. Then setup ESXi for MPIO round robin in the GUI with 4 NICs on separate Vlans. You would think this is enough but it is not. I was still getting 95MBs performance but instead of seeing 1 nic 100% utilized I saw 4 NIC's 25% utilized. This had me stumped till I found an article about MPIO round robin IOPS and how by default it is set to 1000. It needs to be set to 1. So this ESXi 5 command must be run on each host from SSH. for i in `ls /vmfs/devices/disks/ | grep naa.600` ; do esxcli storage nmp psp roundrobin deviceconfig set -d $i --iops 1 --type iops;done Once I did that my read performance went from 95MBs to 400MBs with 4 NICs using the vmware OpenPerformanceTest.icf on IoMeter. Now I am thrilled with the performance of the Readynas 4200 and feel comfortable virtualizing my Exchange server. A detailed step by step guide has been posted here https://sites.google.com/site/abraindum ... erformance Troy
changing block size
Greetings, I am hoping someone can point me in the right direction. I have a Readynas Pro 4 that I am using as a Veeam backup repository with a Vsphere 5 environment. The repository is setup as Windows share on a server 2012 VM. When I try to back up my Domain Controller Vm the job fails. The error I get refers to the block size as too small, the VM I am trying to backup is 2TBs, my data store is 7.6 TBs. Veeam points me to a VM ware knowledge base article that explains how to configure and change VMFS volumes using the Vsphere console, this doesn’t help me because my data store is a Windows share. I need to know how to re-configure the ReadyNAS and give it a larger block size. When I created the iSSCi LUN I don’t remember any options to change block sizes. I understand that I will need to re-create the data store, which is fine because we just purchased the software. Can someone help, or at least point me to the correct information? Thanks in advance.NFS or iSCSi on Pioneer NVX with VSphere 5.1?
I've got a CISCO UCS installation I'm prepping for and I wanted to try and simulate the virtual machine storage on my NAS. Has anyone clocked the performance of NFS vs iSCSi (or vice-versa) with the ReadyNas line, and if so, where is this information posted? Thanks. Jay
RN2120 as a "SAN" for ESXi 5.5 hosts
Hi all, I currently own a RN2120 that i use as a simple NAS for home file storage and I've never had a lick of trouble with it. So much so that I want to see whether another of the same units would serve me in another capacity. I have two VMware ESXi 5.5 hosts at home both running VMs from local storage and I want to see how another RN2120 would cope as iSCSI shared storage for running the VMDKs for these VMs. I'm interested in any experiences that people have of using the RN2120 in this capacity, especially specifics on: Performance: How does the RN2120 cope as a shared storage device running multiple VMs (none with very high IO requirements). Is there a preferred configuration in terms of RAID to achieve maximum performance? Compatibility: Has anyone had issues running ESXi 5.5 against a RN2120? Were you able to work around them? NFS vs. iSCSI: The RN2120 datasheets all list the iSCSI features and compatibilities and iSCSI is always how I've set up shared storage for VMware previously, but does anyone have very significant arguments in favour of NFS? Any personal experiences people have of ANY kind would be greatly appreciated as I don't want to spend several hundred pounds on one for this purpose and not have it pan out! Cheers, Q.
Readynas 2100, ESXi 5.5u2?
Hey We've got a ReadyNAS 2100 that we use as an iscsi datastore for a single esxi host. We're currently running esxi4.2, about to upgrade to 5.1. One of our future paths involves upgrading some VM guests to Debian 7, which required esxi5+. Although he Radynas2100 isn't certified to run 5.5 - is there a reason it should or shouldn't work? Thanks
