How to create a NFS export and CIFS share in celerra manager??. SOS please!!

Thanks a million "Dynamox". Appreciate all your answers. I see you in almost every discussion in powerlink .

Few doubts:

a) If i can present all the CIFS filesystems through a single CIFS server, then why would i ever need to create one?. What is the benefit of creating multiple CIFS server.

b) From what i understand from your answer, interfaces are IP addresses assigned to NIC cards on the data mover, correct?

c) You said that there can be only 1 interface associated with a CIFS server. In that case, if i have 6 interfaces configured on the Celerra, i can only have a maximum of  6  CIFS server on that celerra, correct?

d) The domain admin user name and password information required during the CIFS server creation step, is asking me to provide authentication details to join the domain. This is not something i create; instead this is the information, i would need to get from the Windows admin and active directory people. correct?

e) To mount an export created in celerra, they would use the ip address of the data mover, correct?

Thanks again!!!

1) not necessarily, you can have on CIFS server that is using multiple file systems to preset shares to customers.

2) interfaces are IP addresses you assigned to network devices on Celerra. It's kind of like assign multiple ip address to a single network card in Windows.

3) In Celerra terms ..device is your network card, interface is your IP address

4) You can not share interfaces between multiple CIFS servers ..it's like assigning the same ip address to two Windows servers. You can assign multiple interfaces to the same device.

5) that is the account that has permissions to join CIFS server to active directory

6) You have to select an existing CIFS server

7) NFS is served directly from the datamover. So first you can create an interface, let's 192.168.1.25. Then you create a file system and export it via NFS. Your unix/linux system will be conning by mounting nfs by specifying interface name on celerra, something like this:

mount 192.168.1.25:/filesystem_name /local_mountpoint

8) First you create file system, if you create it using Celerra Manager ..it gets automatically mounted. Then you export it to appropriate host with appropriate permissions (read/write/root). Then your NFS client should be able to mount the export (example in step 7)

a) Let's actually take it further. Celerra offers virtual datamovers. Think of vdm as virtual containers that allow you to segregate CIFS servers from different customers. For example:  let's say i have two business units (Marketing and Engineering). Each group has its own IT support people. In the example i would create two separate virtual datamovers and each virtual datamover would contain a CIFS server for each business unit. This will allow me to grant admin rights on each CIFS server to each group and they will not see each other data, where if you had one datamover and two CIFS servers in it ..you could access \\CIFS_server\c$ and actually see file systems for both departments, and that's not good

b) interfaces are ip address, devices are your network cards

c) You can have multiple interfaces assigned to a CIFS server, you cannot share interfaces between multiple CIFS servers. You can configure tons of interfaces, i don't remember what the limit is but i am already at 12 on one of my devices.

d) correct, this is an account that already exists in AD.  You can ask your AD people to pre-create a computer account for you and delegate your AD account privileges to access this object. That way you can use your own credentials to join it to AD.

e) i like to use DNS names but ip will work as well.

some tricks to get started:

go to the doc cd - navigate down to the technicalmodulesPDF directory

for the most important ones just read the few intro pages that say "Concepts"

do your work in the GUI - then tail /nas/logs/cmd_log to see what CLI commands it executed

CLI commands are mostly nas_* or server_* with the Unix commands like nas_fs server_mount server_export ...

nas_* are commands that are independent of the data mover

server_* commands are specific to one data mover

try to book a EMC Celerra training or find a colleague who has a training video CD

Rainer 

a) If i can present all the CIFS filesystems through a single CIFS server, then why would i ever need to create one?. What is the benefit of creating multiple CIFS server.

see my answer below

b) From what i understand from your answer, interfaces are IP addresses assigned to NIC cards on the data mover, correct?

yes - either assigned to a physical interface or a virtual one like a trunk or fail-safe-network (called device in Celerra speak)

c) You said that there can be only 1 interface associated with a CIFS server. In that case, if i have 6 interfaces configured on the Celerra, i can only have a maximum of  6  CIFS server on that celerra, correct?

no - a CIFS server can have as many IP as you want - it just needs to have at least one

since interfaces are just IP adresses you can have much more than 6 CIFS servers

d) The domain admin user name and password information required during the CIFS server creation step, is asking me to provide authentication details to join the domain. This is not something i create; instead this is the information, i would need to get from the Windows admin and active directory people. correct?

correct - usually either:

- they give your account the right to add computers to the domain

- you go there and they enter the account + password

- they pre-create the account for you (more difficult to join then)

e) To mount an export created in celerra, they would use the ip address of the data mover, correct?

yes - any IP address on that data mover will work for NFS (unless you specifically export to a VLAN tag)

reasons to create more than one CIFS server:

- you have multiple VDMs or DMs

- different admistrative control

- consolidate multiple Windows/NetApp servers and dont want to aliases or change the client mounts

- need different settings or local users/groups

- need to be in different Windows domains

Rainer

Hi,

welcome to Celerra.

loosely speaking:

virtual data mover (vdm) = vfiler

pool = aggregate

volume = file system

physical data mover = filer head

device = vif

fsn - multi-mode? vif

file systems get mounted on *a* (physical/virtual) data mover and NFS and all CIFS servers can access them

a data mover can host a large number of CIFS servers (509)

you can create up to 29 data movers and create your CIFS server(s) on these instead of the physical data mover

vdm's are used for replication - with them the CIFS data like shares, localgroups,... get replicated as well - think of a vdm being an extra /vol/vol0 for CIFS purposes

or you use vdm's if one group shouldnt see the other groups file systems (a CIFS server on a VDM can only "see" file systems mounted on that VDM and not from other VDMs or the physical data mover)

a CIFS server needs at least one interface through which it talks to the clients

one interface can only be used by one CIFS server (same as with Windows or NetApp) - when a reqeust comes in the Celerra has to be able to send it to correct CIFS server (it doesnt always have the name - you could be connecting using the IP address)

usually you create a device like a trunk or fsn on top of a physical device like a 1GBit Ethernet port

on any device you can create a number of interfaces (509) - an interface is just an IP address

a NFS client can mount any export on any file system through any of the intefaces on that data mover by default

when you use the GUI creating a file system will automatically create the mountpoint and the mount table entry

hope that helps

Rainer

P.S.: the Celerra forum in the support section is really better for these kind of questions - this one here is meant for software developers

to create your first CIFS server I would suggest to use the "Create CIFS server" wizard in Celerra Manager GUI

it will do some things for you like starting the CIFS service and enabling Unicode that you otherwise would have to do manually

you really did not like my replies Rainer ?

dynamox schrieb: you really did not like my replies Rainer ?

sorry - once I hit reply I couldnt see the other answer - and then I got carried away

lets see if we have him confused enough ....

Rainer

Holy Crap!!!. This is information overload for me. I need some time to read all the responses and make sense out of it. I will get back to you folks if i have  doubts. Thanks all of you for your responses. Celerra is way too complex compared to a Netapp. Data mover, cifs server, interfaces, Virtual Data mover........why why why???. I mean a newbie NAS guy like me doesnt get paid enough to work with such complex technology. I am going to talk to my manager about a raise.

by the way ..try to make your way to support forums instead of Developer Network forums. In support forums you will find a lot more EMC guys monitoring and helping customers.

you will find Celerra very intuitive after a while, easy to manage ..but your manager does not need to know that

Dynamox & Rainer,

I figured the CIFs part. I cannot thank you guys enough for your help

For the NFS export:

you mentioned that the NFS export would be mounted on the NFS client as follows:

mount :/  

Question 1) Can i provide the NFS client the ip of "any" interface as "IP address of data mover"?.

Question 2) What if the interface is assigned to a CIFS server?. Can i provide the ip of this interface to the NFS client?

Question 3) I tried to mount using ip address of the interface assigned to a CIFS server on a unix server. I can read but not write to the NAS although root access has been specified for this unix server.

These are my final questions. Please answer.