Can CIFS shares be DFS roots?

[craigz]

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

[konkle]

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.

JK

--

Joshua Konkle
Technical Evangelist, NAS

Reduce time to market

http://blogs.netapp.com/engineeringapps

[rkaramchedu1]

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..

[craigz]

Thanks for the quick response, guys!

thanks!

--craig

949-702-7180 - mobile

NetApp.

Go Further, Faster.

[HENRYPAN2]

Hello JK,

Would you be kind enough to share the latest update on deploy DFS on filer?

Thanks & Happy 2013

Henry

[support_1]

Hallo

Eine neue Beschreibung mit NetApp CIFS in DFS zu verlinken findet ihr hier: http://www.netapp.com/us/media/tr-3782.pdf (vorausgesetzt es wird Windows Server 2008R eingesetzt).

Somit gibt es eine Lösung, jedoch gibt es mit Replikationen Probleme. Replikationen werden aber mit NetApp Volumes eigentlich nicht benötigt, du kannst ja das Volume u.a. via Mirror konfigurieren.

Für Replikationsunterstützung gibt es jedoch Tools wie zum Beispiel PeerLink – ist offiziell von NetApp und Microsoft zertifiziert.

Pascal