CIFS Servers and MAC Users

[TMADOCTHOMAS]

Years ago, MAC users experienced performance issues when connecting to NetApp CIFS Servers. We mitigated this by giving them a Windows file server instead which worked fine. Does anyone have insight into the current status of these issues? I'm potentially going to need to configure a CIFS Server for Windows and MAC users for the first time in years and would prefer to keep them all together if performance issues have been resolved. Any insight will be helpful! Thank you.

[ttran]

Hello Tmadocthomas,

Doing a quick search does show MAC clients are Supported, you can narrow down specific ONTAP, SMB, and OSX versions on the NetApp Interoperability Matrix.

Also wanted to point out this specific tidbit that might be useful:

Guidelines for using automatic node referrals with Mac OS clients 

"Mac OS X clients do not support SMB automatic node referrals, even though the Mac OS supports Microsoft's Distributed File System (DFS). Windows clients make a DFS referral request before connecting to an SMB share. ONTAP provides a referral to a data LIF found on the same node that hosts the requested data, which leads to improved client response times. Although the Mac OS supports DFS, Mac OS clients do not behave exactly like Windows clients in this area."

Regards,

Team NetApp

[TMADOCTHOMAS · Accepted solution]

Thanks @ttran . After researching the issue further, I recalled that we used a product called ExtremeZ-IP years ago to partly mitigate the issue. Today that product has been bought by Acronis, and their latest version, now called Acronis Files Connect, now explicitly resolves this issue on NetApp systems specifically! So I was able to track down the answer.

[parisi]

Also, keep these in mind:

https://whyistheinternetbroken.wordpress.com/2021/04/14/macos-nfs-clients-with-ontap-tips-and-considerations/

[ttran]

Hello @TMADOCTHOMAS,

I dug into our case repository regarding MAC client and ExtremeZ-IP and did find a case regarding client slowness. Packet traces were analyzed and there weren't any latency issues on the ONTAP side. The analysis of the traces did identify a segmenting issue between the application and the MAC clients.

Good to hear that Acronis File Connect resolved the issue. Let us know if you have any further inquiries.

Regards,

Team NetApp

TMADOCTHOMAS