topic Re: Question on Vserver / CIFS server naming.. in Network and Storage Protocols

Question on Vserver / CIFS server naming..

subhash_kotkar — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 05:41:08 GMT

one of our customer configured vservers name which were DNS resolvable and they were accessing CIFS shares using vserver names and not by CIFS server names.

Both vserver and CIFS server names were different and pointing to same IP however CIFS server names were not registered in DNS. Do you have idea what’s the best practice NetApp recommends around this?

I am listing down some scenarios below.

Configure different hostname for CIFS servers and vserver name and register only vserver names in DNS and then access CIFS shares using DNS resolvable vserver name.
Keep CIFS server name same as vserver names and do DNS registration and access shares using CIFS servers name?
Configure vserver and CIFS servers name different. Register only CIFS server name in DNS and access the share using CIFS server name.

Re: Question on Vserver / CIFS server naming..

kodavali — Wed, 12 Mar 2014 06:05:10 GMT

Here the concern should be AD authentication (Kerberos).

When we create CIFS server, it will register it as computer account in AD. If the end users use any alias apart from CIFS server name to access the shares, then the authentication fall back to NTLM. Kerberos authentication does not work.

What is the rational behind using the DNS alias instead of CIFS server?

Re: Question on Vserver / CIFS server naming..

subhash_kotkar — Wed, 12 Mar 2014 08:03:09 GMT

No specific reason as per customer one of the netapp guy came to deploy cluster mode and customer now thinks this must be right way to go as somebody from netapp done setup.

I think I should go back and educate customer to use CIFS server name for share access and register same in DNS. make sense?