[Enderboi]

Ah yes.

I've also seen NFS/ZFS on Linux have very... bizzare... issues with locking, latency, and poor handling of errors bubbled up from the block layer taking down clients or even the host.

All of these went away when we redeployed everything into a Solaris-based distro (still exporting ZFS shares to Linux clients via NFS). It does seem something specific to the interaction of these two components under load on a Linux kernel.

Unfortunately, it also only happens under real-world production load and was impossible to create reliable test-case with simulated stress tests or benchmarking :(

[sydbarrett74]

Did you ever evaluate FreeBSD? My hesitation with Illumos and downstream distros is the small number of people maintaining the ecosystem (not that any of the BSD's have huge dev teams by comparison, but still).

That said, I think OpenSolaris is technically superior in most ways to any of the BSD's.

[Enderboi]

Yeah, FreeBSD was an improvement with regards to ZFS/NFS integration not having any major issues.

Unfortunately we had some strange HBA issues with our disk shelves, which went away with an Illumos downstream. Since our use case for this was basically an isolated box that just supplied NFS shares, the limited ecosystem wasn't a major concern more so than stability :)

[hossbeast]

As someone storing important stuff on ZoL on my desktop, this is concerning to read. OTOH I'm 4+ years in, I've never had an issue, and I have backups (outside of the zfs volume itself).

[lakomen]

Yeah I've had nothing but bad experiences with ZoL