How to Mount CIFS Volume in Windows

netappbur · ‎2011-03-16

Hello folks, I beleive this is my first question to the forums as as you will soon see I am new to Netapp.

I would like to Virtualize a physical box and migrate the data to a Netapp volume. The server needs to remain running for other apps.

I have robocopied the data from the server to a netapp CIFS volume and now I would like to VM the server's "C" drive.

What I'm hoping to do next is mount the migrated CIFS volume to the Virtual machine and have it comunicate to the Netapp as it would with a phisical disk.

Can this be done?

naveenh · ‎2011-03-16

Are you using vCenter Converter?

Thanks, Naveen

netappbur · ‎2011-03-16

Yes I am.

akw_white · ‎2011-03-23

Can this be done?

Probably not. Windows drive mappings are normally user-specific and therefore only available while a specific user is logged on. Depending on what you want to use this drive to do you may be able to get away with it but it will never work exactly the same as a disk attached to the server.

Are you using your NetApp filer as your VM datastore? If so it sounds like you would be better off creating a virtual disk for your server and migrating the data from the CIFS volume to that - this will give you all the advantages of a physical disk and NetApp storage. Alternatively you might want to use Raw Device Mapping rather than a virtual disk. As another alternative you could use iSCSI in your VM to attach to the data on the NetApp filer. None of these methods use CIFS.

CIFS is "file level" storage. To do what you want to do you will probably need "block level" storage or virtual disks. Virtual disks can be hosted on block-level storage or file-level storage but only if you use NFS, not CIFS.

Let me know if you have any questions.

henrypan1 · ‎2011-03-24

Akw

Please also advice whether this apply to protocal SMB 2?

Thanks

akw_white · ‎2011-03-24

SMB2 works the same as CIFS in this case. As I said, you might be able to get it to work depending on exactly what you want to achieve but it is not the "proper" way to do it. It is similar to but not the same as having a disk attached to the server.