ReadyNAS 4220 as ESXi Datastore - NFS way slower than iSCSI

[guitman]

I just set up a 12 drive 4220 and began some performance testing. Just simple file read and write operations. The 4220 is connected as a datastore to an ESXi host.

I tried both as iSCSI and NFS. I like the NFS idea as I can just have one huge datastore and am not limited to 2TB LUNs. But, iSCSI is so much faster it seems.

iSCSI Write: 60-70MB
NFS Write: 16MB.

I enabled async on the NFS share, and that did nothing to help the performance. Anything else I can try to speed up NFS?

[guitman]

I have some more information, and this is not isolated to VMWare.

If I connect to my Windows 7 and 2008 machines to my ReadyNAS 4220 using NFS, I get incredibly slow file copy performance. About 10-20MBPS. SMB to the same share is lightning fast, around 100-120MBPS. Also, NFS from a Mac is lightning fast. So, it seems VMWare ESXi and Windows are really slow connecting to NFS. I tried to move a 700MB ISO file from a local data store to an NFS datastore and it was going to take 4 minutes. From my mac it took seconds to the same NFS datastore.

I tried this with multiple Windows machines, both physical and virtual.

[mmcalister44]

I have a ReadyNAS 3220 running Firmware 6.1.6

My NFS is running very very slow.

According to VMware I have an Avg NFS Write Latency of 130ms!

What is very odd is I have two identical ReadyNAS 3200 units using NFS on the same network with a Write Latency of 1.4ms!

Did you ever get an answer? I read the release notes of 6.1.6 firmware and it mentioned it improved the NFS speed.

Any help would be appreciated.

M