topic Re: DFS and CIFS shares in Network and Storage Protocols

DFS and CIFS shares

Tirthaghy — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 22:25:44 GMT

Hello everyone,

Good morning,

We wanted to implement Microsoft DFS in place of CIFS that we currently have. Will the CIFS share support the DFS implementation.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Re: DFS and CIFS shares

Renifa — Mon, 04 Jan 2016 10:30:19 GMT

Hi,

Yes we can. Once DFS is installed on an NT server, using the DFS Administrator tool, you need to make entries for the filer's Common Internet File System protocol (CIFS) shares in the DFS root tree. Refer the following Kb for more details.

https://kb.netapp.com/support/index?page=content&id=1010588&actp=search&viewlocale=en_US&searchid=1451899639226

Hope this helps.

Re: DFS and CIFS shares

Tirthaghy — Mon, 04 Jan 2016 14:01:00 GMT

The KB was helpful, thank you!

However, NetApp and windows are based on very differnt operating systems, can you please elaborate as to how this is going to work. Will this involve any sort of data migration?

Also, how will the permission to affected on the shares?

Thank you!

Re: DFS and CIFS shares

mbeattie — Wed, 06 Jan 2016 02:38:05 GMT

Hi,

Here is a link to a technical report that explains how to integrate CIFS shares within a DFS infrastrucutre

http://www.netapp.com/au/media/tr-3782.pdf

/matt

Re: DFS and CIFS shares

hanover23 — Wed, 06 Jan 2016 16:42:41 GMT

If you are talking about masking the "real" name/location of an SMB share on a NetApp by using a DFS target defined in Active Directory, that can be done successfully. The main problems I encountered with that approach usually revolved around "weird" old SMBv1 clients (like a multifunction printer/scanner that scans a document and ships it to the SMB share). Also, there were sometimes issues with various flavors of Apple OS, but typically by mapping with cifs://my.dfs.example.com/share/sharename instead of smb://, that got it working. My understanding is that cifs:// forces the Mac OS to autonegotiate down to SMBv1, which apparently is less problematic.

But the vast majority of clients, both Windows and Macs, worked just fine with a AD-based DFS target to a NetApp SMB share.