Welcome to this EMC Support Community Ask the Expert conversation. This is an opportunity to learn about and discuss the way Macs and OneFS interoperate.
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This discussion begins on 11/11/2013 and concludes on 11/22/2013 Get ready by bookmarking this page or signing up to receive email notifications.
Your host is Bernie Case!
Name: | Bernie Case |
Occupation: | Tech Support Engineer IV |
Biography: | My original career path was taking me toward audio production and engineering, but I got mixed up in a "bad" crowd of IT folks during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s and that's where I've focused my talents ever since. I use my knowledge and experience with networking protocols, media and entertainment workflows, Mac OS X, *nix, Windows, and system administration to help solve interesting, complex, and sometimes urgent problems. |
URL: | http://www.emc.com |
Expertise: | Multiple flavors of Mac OS, including pre-OS X through OS X 10.9, networking protocols (OSI layer 2 and up), system administration. |
Company: | EMC Isilon |
City: | Seattle |
State: | WA |
Country: | USA |
Display Name: | Bernie Case |
Web Site: | http://www.emc.com |
This Ask the Expert thread is now open!
Hello a litte bit of topic but
Is there a plan to push Isilon as a premary VMware storage in the next onefs release? We are currently use onefs 7.1.on S200, any improuvemt soon?
last question, should we put SSD in our S200 of VMware only storage (A lot of VM conected but not a lot of files)?
Hi Alain!
Thanks for asking your questions. I'd recommend, in the future, to start a new thread so that we can properly answer your questions there.
I'm not completely aware of any new plans to reposition OneFS for VMware environments, although there were a number of performance improvements implemented in 7.1 that give us higher IOPs which may help. It's possible someone else can give more details.
Regarding SSDs on your S200s. If your entire workflow is nothing but VM, then there likely would not be a large benefit from SSD. But, if you stored home directories or other highly latency-sensitive metadata on your nodes, SSDs would help quite a lot.
Thanks for the questions,
Bernie
So let's start with something that I'm quite excited about: SMB2 support in OS X.
Apple, in OS X Lion, moved away from Samba, instead implementing its own SMB client and server called smbx. SMB2 support was something that had been rumored to be coming in Lion (10.7), but the SMB client in Lion and Mountain Lion (10.8) was sadly absent. Funny enough, however, the SMB2 server is present, and can be confirmed by running /usr/sbin/smbd --help, which explains that that SMB2 support is experimental in those releases, and even Mavericks (10.9) where it is enabled by default.
Thankfully though, the SMB2 client in Mavericks is not experimental, and has been enabled by default in Mavericks. What this means for the Mac users is that they can get much higher throughput now when connecting to OneFS 7.x clusters due to the SMB 2.1 support included in those releases. We expect that performance for Macs with OneFS 6.5.x will be largely similar to SMB1 because that version of OneFS supports a smaller (64KB) maximum read and write size. OneFS 7.x supports up to 1MB read and write sizes, which greatly boosts throughput on 10Gbit networks. For more information, see this previous post on ECN.
Apple indicated in its Mavericks Core Technologies Overview that SMB2 is automatically used to share files between two Macs running OS X Mavericks. That has not been my experience locally; AFP appears to still be used between my Macs. But, SMB2 will be used automatically against Isilon clusters that support it (6.5.x and later).
While the compatibility guides do not reflect support for OS X Mavericks, it's something I'm working with our documentation group to update. We do support OS X Mavericks in OneFS 6.5 and later, but we prefer customers use OneFS 7.0.x and later for maximum performance.
There is an issue I have seen with the SMB2 support in Mavericks. Getting a list of SMB shares may fail when the Isilon cluster is running OneFS 6.5.x, particularly in environments with a large number of shares. Connecting directly to the share, by its sharename (i.e. smb://server/share), will still work. If you are having this issue in your environment please open up a support case and ask that your issue be escalated to Isilon engineering.
I look forward to future questions and comments. Thanks!
Hi Bernie!
Thanks for taking the time out for answering our questions on all things OSX!
I know you did some work with OSX and NFS 4 with kerberos/AD. Can you share with us some of your findings and oberservations.
Hints,Tips, pitfalls etc.
Look forward to the thread!
Hi broreg,
Thanks for the note and thanks for reading! OS X, NFSv4, and Kerberos are all very interesting topics. I've been working on an update to the Mac Best Practices Guide (see the OneFS 6.5 version here) which takes into account all of these topics. The updated guide is being reviewed by our Info Development team and should be published this quarter. But, getting back to your question, here's what I've learned...
As it is currently, if customers would like to use NFS in an AD authentication environment while, at the same time, maintaining the ability to authenticate and authorize users by their AD credentials, they can do one of two things:
NFS user squash is obviously the easier option, but does not allow for a high level of permissions granularity. It may, however, work well in environments that only have a few Mac users in an otherwise larger AD domain.
Services for Unix implementation can be an involved process, particularly if no UIDs and GIDs have been added to accounts in AD. Isilon professional services can assist customers with getting UIDs and GIDs for AD users and groups from the Mac and importing them into AD (details on the Mac side of this process can be found in this KB). The Mac, by default, automatically generates UIDs and GIDs for AD accounts based on the GUID in an AD account (meaning, the UIDs and GIDs match for the same AD account, no matter which Mac you've logged into). This enables us to get a full list of UIDs and GIDs from the Mac, import them into AD accounts, and then configure OneFS to get UIDs and GIDs directly from AD. This allows OneFS to map UIDs and GIDs it retrieves from AD directly to Windows SIDs, which makes multi-protocol (NFS for Macs, SMB for Windows) environments possible, and manageable.
Again, thanks for the question, and please let me know if you have any others!
Thanks,
Bernie
NFS vs SMB, which is better for my Mac users?
Like a lot of things with NAS, the answer is often, "It depends..." I find that, often, the answer comes when you answer a few other questions:
The Mac Best Practices guide goes into these topics in the Workflow Consideration section, but I want to share some anecdotes that precipitated the creation of those questions.
Media & Entertainment environments typically like to see higher performance for their users, particularly in interactive or near-interactive video editing or video post-production workflows. NFSv3 has been the better choice here, given that it provides high throughput on higher throughput networks like 10GbE. SMB2 may, however, become more feasible in these environments when used with OneFS 7.x, given the performance improvements in that protocol. I will still recommend NFSv3 in environments that make heavy use of wide directories (e.g. environments that process Cineon frames) because NFSv3 can retrieve metadata from Isilon much faster due to enhancements in its protocol.
SMB can be beneficial in media & entertainment workflows where Windows clients are also accessing the cluster. Using SMB allows Mac-specific resource fork data to get stored within an Alternate Data Stream, which the Windows clients will not see. That's better for some environments that don't want to have to deal with all of the dotbar (._) files that the Mac will create on an NFS export. But, the Mac retrieves file and resource fork metadata via SMB much more slowly than it does via NFS, which can be frustrating for users in environments where thousands of items are stored within just one directory. It often helps, with SMB, to architect directory structure that limits the total number of objects stored in one directory. And, for both protocols, limit the use of the Finder's column view option! (The Finder deserves its own post, so I'll save more details for then!)
SMB is a good choice for environments that require AD authentication. Given that it will natively attempt Kerberos authentication on AD domain-joined Macs, it can be easier to get it authenticated to the cluster. But, the Mac's SMB client will not show file system ACLs when connected to SMB shares (a note on this: OS X 10.5 does show POSIX-style ACLs, but 10.6 and later do not).
NFS authentication and authorization can be a little more challenging depending on the environment, as I mentioned earlier in this thread. Care must be taken with NFS to make sure that the POSIX style permissions that are seen on the Mac are going to give the logged-in user access to an object. Programs like Final Cut Pro rely on these permissions to determine access (a forthcoming KB will share more detail about this). Finder, on the other hand, will often try the operation on the object even if the permissions do not seem to give it much access.
I think this is all I have for now. Cheers!
So let's talk about this guy...
The Finder, for those not too familiar with the Mac, is the graphical file manager that has been with the Mac since the beginning (24 January 1984, and that date has special significance even now as I'll explain below). The Finder has some interesting behaviors when it's used against network storage, such as:
We have a number of other KB articles about the Finder available here. Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend everybody!
There's one other big thing about the Finder I didn't mention, and I think it's fairly important: try to avoid the use of Column View. For those not familiar with column view, here's what it looks like in 10.9:
What this view shows you is a directory structure that's a few levels deep. My example here is very, very simple, and I have used TinkerTool to enable the display of the path up in the title bar of the window (and a Finder option to show it at the bottom, as well). Each column denotes a different level of the overall directory tree. No doubt, column view is a popular view, and shows a lot of useful information. That information comes at a price, however.
Remember in my previous post where I said that Finder won't display items to a user until it's retrieved the list of items and resource fork data for the folder? Imagine how this plays out with Column view, where not one, but multiple levels of a directory tree are on display for the user. Finder has to keep multiple directories refreshed and updated constantly, which takes more network calls between the Mac and the server. I have seen some cases, with column view, where someone was trying to load just a small directory containing just a few items, but had to wait minutes for that directory to load. When I was able to see what was happening on the network, I found that the Finder was doing directory listings and resource fork data retrieval for directories that were several levels higher in the tree. Until Finder had completed its work there was it able to display the directory. Not a great experience for the user, unfortunately.
I typically recommend list view, but I do so with a couple of extra recommendations:
There are, of course, some Finder replacements out there which greatly alleviate shortcomings in the Finder's retrieval of file and directory data. Pathfinder is one such option, and may work better for you. But, for those stuck to using Finder, like me, these simple tips should hopefully improve your Finder experience against Isilon, or any NAS for that matter.
Thanks,
Bernie