Thanks that helped me get me started on where to go with this. But it also has led me to more questions.
Currently my plan of attack is this:
1. Set up home directories on a separate CIFS share than my file server (that seemed to be the best practice guideline...I honestly don't care if it is on the file server or not, I just want to do this right).
2. Enable home directories and point it to the newly created CIFS share
3. Create qtrees on the new volume to manage 2-3 different tiers of storage quotas (exec, normal user, etc) which will probably be managed per group rather than per user
Now here are my questions:
1. It sounds like from what you are saying, I don't actually have to make the home directories volume a CIFS share to make it work:
On filer123 the admin sets the home directories value to /vol/homedirs (not a CIFS share, this is just the NetApp volume name), and creates a folder called aduser567 then if I'm user aduser567 I can see a share called \\filer123\aduser567 and have all rights to it. No other user can see this share (except admins if you set it up to, via a options command).
I am having some trouble making sense of how this would work...but if it does work that would be great. I guess I just figured it would need to be a CIFS share so it would properly share out to my network. Any help or direction on this would be great and it might save me the hassle of either a) setting up home directories on my existing CIFS share or b) creating a new one.
2. Like I said, I am new to NetApp so the concept of qtrees is new to me as well. I don't really understand what exactly qtrees are or what they do. From what I can gather they are used to essentially partition out a volume and you can control each "partition" with quotas or whatever. When you browse to a qtree say in Windows Explorer, does it just show up as a folder or something? And if I want to set up a tiered storage approach can I simply just create a qtree for each tier?
Thanks in advance for your help!