Can WFA be used for CIFS/NFS setup,management of shares & exports in a vFiler ?

[adaikkap]

As all of us know, today none of the Manageability tools provide setup and management of shares & exports in a vFiler.

Neither, Filer View nor SM2.0 does this, which are our basic device management tools.

Same is the case with our Provisioning Manager, where one can setup cifs in a vfiler, but not create shares or exports unless its part of a dataset.

Also modifying shares or exports in still not possible with Prov Mgr even if they are part of dataset.

I am trying to see if WFA can solve this(rather bridge this disconnect.)

Regards

adai

[pwl]

the short answer is yes.

the long answer is that WFA is essentially a front-end to scripting tools.  if you can do it in powershell, you can do it with WFA (in a relatively structured & repeatable way)

the bad news is that the interface is very different from, say, SM2.0 - WFA is not intended as a general-purpose systems admin tool, but rather a way of creating and launching frequently-used workflows with a constrained set of parameters.

however, if your case involved setting up lots of cifs shares on vfilers on a regular basis (and especially if you're using some other orchestration tools in the overall environment) then WFA would probably be a great help.

i'm not use if a CIFS on vfiler workflow will be included out of the box - but it's been done before & should be easy enough to repeat.

[yaronh]

Hello Adai,

Yes, it is possible to setup and create CIFS shares or NFS exports on vfilers, regardless of datasets.

We did include this as part of the certified commands released with version 1.0 (Released in a different thread).

Yaron

[hill]

Adai,

As both Peter and Yaron mentioned, the short answer is Yes.  Here are some additional comments:

• WFA can definitely help here.  A workflow can be created that performs the creation of the Shares / Exports (or both) for the vFiler / vFilers
• As Peter indicated, some work will be required.
  • With WFA someone would define the desired, repeatable process (resource selection, naming convention, sizes, shares, export options, if there will be replication, etc)
  • then an 'operator' will come in and elect to execute that 'Create vFiler Shares' workflow, where they provide a limited set of user inputs and it performs the various storage system tasks as defined by the workflow.

As a side topic, we are working on enhancing the Workflow Automation Communities to be better able to support collaboration and the sharing of WFA building blocks and workflows.  This sounds like something that would be a good candiate to create as a Workflow Template, and I'd be happy to work with you on that.  Let's sync up offline in order to round out the details for such a template, so it can be made available to everyone, and they can then tailor that template to their specific needs.

Kevin