from WAFL to share or LUN

[FelixZhou]

Can someone explain how NetApp curves out CIFS shares or LUNs from volumes, what is the role of WAFL involved?

[mjdalton1]

About WAFL - https://blog.netapp.com/tech-ontap-podcast-episode-130-wafl-deep-dive/

Understanding LUN's and Modern SAN https://www.netapp.com/us/media/tr-4080.pdf

Link to free NetApp Customer training:  https://learningcenter.netapp.com/content/public/production/LearningPath/TG_Customers/NAU_TG_Customers.pdf

[FelixZhou · Accepted solution]

Each Flexible Volume (FlexVol) is a separate WAFL file system, located on an aggregate and distributed across all disks in the aggregate.

Block device access with SUN protocols like iSCSI, FC, FCoE is done with LUN emulation similar to Loop device technique
on top of a FlexVol volume, thus each LUN on WAFL file system appears as a file,
yet have additional properties required for block devices