OneFS 8.X home directory guidance

Not particularly, in general, try to consolidate down your number of shares and Drive letters from the windows servers into as simple of a folder structure as possible on Isilon.  I once helped a customer migrate from 16 windows file servers with only 60TB of data, onto an Isilon cluster.  There were 9,000 SMB shares covering that 60TB of data.  Turns out, as you might have guessed that 8,200 of those are 1 share per user for home directories.  With some powershell scripting to update AD profile paths during the cutover event, those 8,200 were cut down to just 1 share with variable expansion.

So:

\\cluster-scz.domain.com\home points to /ifs/accesszone/homedirs/%U

Also, never use /ifs/data, /ifs/home, or /ifs/.ifsvar to store any user data.  So in general make sure you understand good tenants of Isilon filesystem design/layout.

Make sure you understand the pros/cons of using user quotas versus directory quotas for homedirs. (directory quotas will show the mapped network drive as the size of the hard quota limit).  User/Group Quotas will show the mapped network drive size as the size of the cluster, though the provisioning can be done dynamically per user, which is really helpful.

Think about the data itself and the users themselves.  I once came across a customer that wanted to protect the data of their VP's and above (CxO) at a higher level than their normal users.  So they created a different folder for those VIPs, and set a different filepool policy on that directory and it's contents, I think 4x mirroring instead of N+2:1 at the time (erasure coding in the old format).

Think about self-service restore with snapshots / VSS integration.  What's makes sense for application data in other folders may not be right for homedirs.

Setup your email templates for quota notifications, (assuming you get to use quotas).

That's all that comes to mind off the top of my head.  OneFS 8.x + only introduces concepts that may be more helpful in multi-tenant homedir environments, like groupnets.  But unless you have to have those, I'd avoid them.

Chris Klosterman

Principal SE, Datadobi

chris.klosterman@datadobi.com