NetApp Technology Network: Message List - Can CIFS shares be DFS roots?

Re: Can CIFS shares be DFS roots?

craigz@netapp.com — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 02:47:05 GMT

Thanks for the quick response, guys!

thanks!

--craig

949-702-7180 - mobile

NetApp.

Go Further, Faster.

Re: Can CIFS shares be DFS roots?

community@netapp.com — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 02:19:38 GMT

Josh is right on the money. The NetApp CIFS cannot serve as a DFS root. They can join a DFS root as "leaf nodes" however. You could use VFM for Global namespace purposes or even a Windows VM.

Also, if the customer's environment has Macintosh (mac os x etc), then know that the CIFS client on mac os x does not yet work with DFS either..

Re: Can CIFS shares be DFS roots?

community@netapp.com — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 21:33:26 GMT

My understanding of this is that NO; NetApp cannot be a DFS root. However....(patching in from another email thread I had going internally)

The VFM namespace availability policy can create a widelink namespace on the FAS to have the same DFS structure as a DFS root. The admin could have a separate DFS root on a Windows host strictly for admin purposes. They'd manage the DFS root through the VFM UI and let the namespace availability policy duplicate the changes into the widelink namespace (netapp). By connecting CIFS clients to the widelink namespace, the admin gets the benefits of DFS along with the reliability of the FAS .

http://partners.netapp.com/mycommunities/PartnerCenter/tools/spotlight-demos.html

Review the global namespace availability

http://partners.netapp.com/see/mycomm/partnercenter/tools/spotlight-pres/demos/vfm/global-namespace.exe

check in the video at 7:36s and you can experience how you can replicate an entire DFS root structure into a filer for HA purposes. The nice part about this is you can have the resiliency of a domain root, with the expandability of a server root (50K links, IIRC).

so the answer to your question is NO, but we can do something really close.

Joshua Konkle
Technical Evangelist, NAS

Reduce time to market

http://blogs.netapp.com/engineeringapps

Can CIFS shares be DFS roots?

craigz@netapp.com — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 16:41:37 GMT

I have a potential customer who would like to run DFS in their NAS environment... Can CIFS chares be DFS roots?