[23david]

For managing volumes, ZFS on Linux works great. But for managing NFS, I'd definitely go with a separate NFS implementation if I wanted to heavily use NFS. The primarily developers/users of the ZFS on Linux port are mainly using it for highly-available single-machine volume management, and exporting volumes to gluster or other clustering filesystems for use in massive HPC clusters like those over at Lawrence Livermore National Labs.

http://www.nersc.gov/assets/Uploads/W01-ZFS-and-Lustre-June-...

ZFS is meant for managing local drives, and to make it performant you need to configure SSD partitions to act as an L2 Arc cache. The online documentation is pretty good, so after going through the docs it should be pretty clear how to set ZFS up properly for your use cases.

But it sounds like you're using EBS drives? If so, not sure why you'd want to use ZFS. Last I checked, ext2 or xfs was the way to go with EBS drives on AWS. AWS has so much stuff going on in the background to ensure reliability/availability of EBS volumes that adding another layer isn't worth it IMO and I've seen similar kernel panics running other complicated volume managers on top of EBS.