WebLogic and NFS, the odd couple...

It's a sort of metropolitan legend that NFS is "not fully supported" with WebLogic (I guess "not fully supported" means "it works unless you do something naughty").


Here is the Official Oracle Reference:

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E14571_01/web.1111/e13814/storetune.htm#CACFDGCA

In fact I had heard in the past that SAN is recommended over NFS.

Some salient excerpts from the above document:

“Oracle strongly recommends verifying the behavior of a server restart after abrupt machine failures when the JMS messages and transaction logs are stored on an NFS mounted directory.”

“The NFS storage device does not become aware of machine failure in a timely manner and the locks are not released by the storage device. As a result, after abrupt machine failure, followed by a restart, any subsequent attempt by WebLogic Server to acquire locks on the previously locked files may fail.”


ONE workaround they suggest is to “disable file locking” on the FileStores of any kind (diagnostics, default, custom file stores, JMS logs...)