topic Re: from WAFL to share or LUN in ONTAP Discussions

from WAFL to share or LUN

FelixZhou — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 12:06:10 GMT

Can someone explain how NetApp curves out CIFS shares or LUNs from volumes, what is the role of WAFL involved?

Re: from WAFL to share or LUN

mjdalton1 — Tue, 17 Dec 2019 20:45:53 GMT

About WAFL - https://blog.netapp.com/tech-ontap-podcast-episode-130-wafl-deep-dive/

Understanding LUN's and Modern SAN https://www.netapp.com/us/media/tr-4080.pdf

Link to free NetApp Customer training: https://learningcenter.netapp.com/content/public/production/LearningPath/TG_Customers/NAU_TG_Customers.pdf

Re: from WAFL to share or LUN

FelixZhou — Tue, 17 Dec 2019 21:28:13 GMT

Each Flexible Volume (FlexVol) is a separate WAFL file system, located on an aggregate and distributed across all disks in the aggregate.

Block device access with SUN protocols like iSCSI, FC, FCoE is done with LUN emulation similar to Loop device technique
on top of a FlexVol volume, thus each LUN on WAFL file system appears as a file,
yet have additional properties required for block devices