Quota on CIFS fileshare in a Windows 2008 environment

[TOBIAS1979]

Hello

We are setting up home directories with quota for a windows based environment with windows 2008r2x64 servers and Windows 7 clients. I had intended to use a cifs share for home directories which I divide into different file quota groups for example 1Gb, 2Gb and 3Gb. It becomes a qtree with three quota of 1Gb, 2Gb and 3Gb.

So the question is:

Can I assign a quota to an Active Directory group?

Rgds

Tobias

[scottgelb]

No groups for NTFS.  User and Tree only.  You can assign default quotas to users though then override per user.

[CHRISTOPHER_BECK]

Since your  Windows based environment why don't you use DFS instead of CIFs shares on the filer? Using the file services in 2008r2 will provide better quota management when used with active directory.

[scottgelb]

There are many advantages of CIFS on NetApp instead of on a windows server... many of our enterprise customers use NetApp to consolidate and migrate off of windows servers.  But I do agree that quotas are not as good or flexible on NetApp...there are 3rd party products that give feature parity but there is a cost and overhead of another bolt on solution for that.

[TOBIAS1979]

Thanks for the quick reply as usual. I read in "Quota Use Guide for NetApp Storage Systems" that NetApp does not support Windows NTFS groups . I think we may consider using Windows file servers instead of cifs on a vFiler.

[scottgelb]

Are you looking at compression and dedup and snapshots?  And replication with SnapMirror or backup with SnapVault?  Those are some things to look at if you put the data on the controller.  With dedup and compression and depending on the size of your data set, the quota rule may not be an issue if you are saving 40% of 2TB for example.

Having the cifs share in the vFiler also gives you a lot of migration and dr capability (dfs does too, but independent of any namespace).  With vfiler dr you can have a hot site and don't have to worry about keeping permissions updated for shares or add/delete/change of shares since the root volume of the vFiler with the configuration is at the dr site...

It might be worth asking your SE about any roadmap or have them check with a TME or product manager about NTFS group support in quotas.

[TOBIAS1979 · Accepted solution]

Hi again

We will probably use  "http://www.northern.net/en/Software-Overview/Disk-Quotas/" for disk quota