We have a couple of available Terastation Pro II - 1 TB NAS boxes. I updated the firmware to 1.32-1.33 which gave me the NFS option. I was able to create a NFS volume on our host VMware 4.0 server. Then I created a virtual machine of Windows 2003 x64 R2 server. This virtual machine leveraged the NFS storage as a data volume. This machine ran fine for several days without a hitch. We spent 3 days copying data from a server we are going to update to this Terastation NAS box. After 3 days of copying the Data, then this morning the virtual machine appeared to be dead. I looked in the VMware VCenter console and saw that the NFS volume was grayed out. It was still showing but grayed out. I couldn't get into the webpage for the Terastation and could not ping it. I rebooted the Terastation and could then ping the IP Address. Took a look at the webpage and verified that all looked OK. Went back into VCenter and mounted the NFS volume again. Rebooted the virtual server and drives were visible again. Users could map drives and all data was usable for a short period of time. Then same thing happened again. When through the same scenario again and same thing happen.
We had another Terastation available, we thought we might have a bad network adapter since we had copied heavily for 3 full days prior to this happening. So we switched out the drives in the two units and tested this out again. Same issue happened with the new Terastation that contained the switched out drives.
When we did the copy it was from a Windows 2003 x64 R2 server with direct attached storage to a virtual machine contained within a VMware ESX 4.0 host server. The Virtual machine is a like server to the Windows 2003 x64 R2. We were doing a robocopy from the Physical Windows 2003 x64 R2 server to the virtual Windows 2003 x64 R2 server.
Does anyone have any suggestions or ideas why after several days of copying, the NFS volume just started to drop connection with the VMware host server?
