we try to create reasonable sized file systems (4-6TB), you have to think about backup and restore times. We sell NAS storage to different departments who have their own IT staff, so we create each CIFS server inside of their own VDM. Since you can only have so many VDM (29 i think), for smaller customers we created a "colo" CIFS server. Each customer still gets their own file system, it's just easier for charge back purposes but they all utilize the same CIFS server. We simply lock it down with NTFS permissions. You could also use one file system but create tree quotas to separate different customers/departments.
I use multiple CIFS servers because I have multiple domains. My environment isn't overly-complicated though - five VDMs and five CIFS servers. Everything is replicated to a DR datacenter and the intention is to move one or two of the VDMs there to run it as a "hot" site in the future. There's two reasons why I have multiple CIFS servers...
A few years ago we moved everything into DFS - in addition to the automated tiering with Rainfinity, I can manually "tier" data but make it look like it has never moved. This will also let you break it into pieces in the future without as much client impact. DFS for the CIFS servers has been great.
I have two LACP trunks with the VDMs spread across them. The trunk that has the replication traffic can get a little busy but the max bandwidth on the WAN is 200Mbit and it hasn't been an issue.
If all of your drives are the same and you aren't worried about tiering, you might get a bigger bang out of dedupe with one big file system.
dynamox
9 Legend
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20.4K Posts
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October 21st, 2010 21:00
we try to create reasonable sized file systems (4-6TB), you have to think about backup and restore times. We sell NAS storage to different departments who have their own IT staff, so we create each CIFS server inside of their own VDM. Since you can only have so many VDM (29 i think), for smaller customers we created a "colo" CIFS server. Each customer still gets their own file system, it's just easier for charge back purposes but they all utilize the same CIFS server. We simply lock it down with NTFS permissions. You could also use one file system but create tree quotas to separate different customers/departments.
DanJost
190 Posts
0
October 22nd, 2010 12:00
I use multiple CIFS servers because I have multiple domains. My environment isn't overly-complicated though - five VDMs and five CIFS servers. Everything is replicated to a DR datacenter and the intention is to move one or two of the VDMs there to run it as a "hot" site in the future. There's two reasons why I have multiple CIFS servers...
A few years ago we moved everything into DFS - in addition to the automated tiering with Rainfinity, I can manually "tier" data but make it look like it has never moved. This will also let you break it into pieces in the future without as much client impact. DFS for the CIFS servers has been great.
I have two LACP trunks with the VDMs spread across them. The trunk that has the replication traffic can get a little busy but the max bandwidth on the WAN is 200Mbit and it hasn't been an issue.
If all of your drives are the same and you aren't worried about tiering, you might get a bigger bang out of dedupe with one big file system.