Smart way to add app storage

Just need some advice. I have two servers. Core and scale running fangtooth.
Core is the main heavy server with all the discs and I’m trying to treat it more like a Nas. Lots of smb shares and a few nfs shares.
On the fangtooth host I’m adding a lot of apps and they need access to the storage on Core. Some of the apps access the same shares on the core host.

I even run 10g fiber on each host so I get max transfer speeds; one port on each of the twin port cards is a direct connection to the other host with nothing in between. I’ve added that ip to services so nfs and smb can run wire speed between them.

Since I’m mounting the same shares in apps on the scale host, I think I caught them clashing under load a few days ago. it’s Unix to Linux so I think nfs is probably a better choice than smb. Right now it’s mostly smb. Smb stresses out the core host (old Xeon processor, i7 with more cores inbound).

Would it be a better idea overall to stick to nfs for mounting the Core shares in the Scale apps and ditch smb for this server to server business? Opinions welcome.

I have not tested the nfs performance in similar scenario yet, so I can’t really comment on that. But if I may add one more point to this query, which might help; what about using a zVol over iscsi in this scenario?

Looking forward to reply from someone who has tried out all the 3 (smb/nfs/zvol) and has experience with them will be able to guide us further. Thanks.

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Must have been hallucinating, it looks like you can only use SMB to add storage within the app configurations, NFS is not an option.