Good Day Everyone,

I have an issue with OpenFiler, a Linux-based operating that converts a computer system into a SAN/NAS appliance. Here is the problem. In my environment we have two Netapp Storevault 500 appliances that I normally perform backups to a NFS share. There are two backup cronjobs that use ghettoVCB to backup two groups of VM's. One group is a pool of 3 VMs. This takes 13 mins to complete. A second job that backups a pool of 5 VMs to a 2nd Storevault appliance which takes 2 hours.

We then installed Openfiler on a old server that has 2 core Xeon processors. There is a software RAID 5 process in place. When performing the same backups to a NFS Openfiler share, the first backup job, which takes 13 mins, takes around 4 hours. The second backup job, which takes 2 hours, takes almost 10 hours to complete. This is unacceptable!!!! Especially considering the strain placed on the host ESX Server. I assumed that because of the software RAID 5, the overhead on the CPU explained the long backup times.

I then installed Openfiler on a 2nd server, an IBM x306 machine which has a P4 Intel processor. This time no software RAID or any RAID at all. A single 750GB hard drive that contained the OS and the rest of the disk uses to backup VMs to a NFS share. I performed the first backup job of the pool of 3 VMs. This time the backup job took 1 and 1/2 hours to complete instead of 13 mins!!!!!!!!!!

Is Openfiler simply poor at being an NFS Server!!!!!!!!!!!!! Has anyone else had these issues with Openfiler?