I have a server called host. It hosts my NFS shares as well as a couple virtual machines using VirtualBox.

Recently I had a relapse of NFS performance issues, which basically made it unusable as NFS server.

After some very long and ZFS centric debugging, I couldn’t find, why the server grounds to halt, when I access even the smallest file over NFS.

Then I remembered, that I was testing something with a new VM and had to move all other VMs to the same NIC as NFS.  I thought that I’ve changed it back when finished with testing, however it wasn’t the case.

You see, it looks like NFS and VirtualBox Bridged Network can not co exist on a same interface. They together render server unusable.

My solution is to have two NICs  one for NFS and server access and as second one ( un-configured and not even appearing in ifconfig ) just for VirtualBox bridge.  I’ve found that this is the only way. It may have something to do with the the way Solaris kernel handles bridging for VB.