Celerra Fileserver, which Windows features are supported

Question

Dear Folks,

a customer of ours is thinking about using an EMC Celerra as a Fileserver in his company. He has specific wishes what should be supported with this configuration. I already got some good advice from the support hotline but there are still some points to be clarified.

This is the list of features our customer wants to be able to use:

- Offline Folder (the possibilty to copy files from the network to your local machine, work with them offline and then automatically synchronize them with the files in the network when you're online again)

- Roaming Profiles

- Folder Redirection (the possibility that not all the folders of the roaming user profile are copied to the local machine, but some folders are used directly from the server)

- Branch Cache

- DFS-Replication

The Question is if and how these features are supported with an EMC Celerra Machine. Thank you in advance,

Cheers,

Markus

Rainer_EMC · Answer

Hi Markus,

welcome to forum.

Offline Folders, Roaming Profles and Folder Redirection work fine with a Celerra if you set to necessary Celerra params.

DFS Replication (FRS) and BranchCache arent implemented - I dont know of any non-native Microsoft Windows CIFS server that can do them.

Apart from the SMB protocol there is a lot of Windows functionality implemened in Celerra DART - but I dont think there is a single place where everything is documented. A good place to start is the "Configuring CIFS on Celerra" manual

For example:

- shared folder management through Windows MMC

- user quota settings through native Windows tools

- local user / group management through MMC

- auditing with Windows compatible security.evt

- DFS-N namespace and local root

- file compression attribute

- a lot of the Windows management API's so that small (rmtshare,..) or large tools (Hyena,...) work

- alternate data streams

- multiple CIFS servers (also in different domains) on a single Celerra

.......

Since you seem to be a partner - please make sure you reach out to your EMC IP Storage TC for more advice.

Rainer

Rainer_EMC · Answer

sorry - I'm not sure - I havent heard about these

transparent caching (the possibility to use the local cache of a client to speed up the read operations)

if its just a function of the SMB2 or SMB2.1 protocol it should work since Celerra has added SMB2.1

dfs-read only (the possibility to use filesystem replications with read-only access rights for the users)

if its just a client-side functionality probably yes - if the DFS root is in the AD it shouldnt matter since the Celerra then is only a leaft node

if it requires DFR-R or an extra server-side component then probably not

Here's what we document about SMB2:

SMB 2.1 features supported with Microsoft Windows 7 and Windows 2008 Release 2 Server

Celerra Network Server version 5.6.47.11 supports the following SMB 2.1 features:

SMB2 leases

The lease feature as compared to the oplock mechanism enables the

client to keep the data cache synchronized with the server for a

longer time. SMB2 leases are more rarely broken than oplocks. This

improves the performance by reducing the network traffic between

the SMB2 client and the server.

The parameter cifs.smb2.capabilities allows specifying the SMB2

capabilities supported by the CIFS servers of the complete Data

Mover including the Virtual Data Movers. Modifying this parameter

affects the SMB negotiation when new SMB2 clients connect to the

Data mover.

Unbuffered write operations

The unbuffered write option gives an opportunity for the client to

write a file with no server-side buffering regardless how the file was

opened. This avoids the client to reopen the file with the

FILE_FLAG_WRITE_THROUGH option for performing the

unbuffered write.

The

Celerra Parameters Guide and the Configuring and Managing CIFS

on Celerra

technical module provide additional information on

managing the SMB protocol.

SMB 2 Protocol Support

As of version 5.6.42.5, Celerra Network Server supports Microsoft’s

new SMB 2 protocol. SMB is the underlying protocol used by CIFS to

request files, print and communicate from a server over a network

through TCP ports. The SMB 2 protocol supports all characters from

the Unicode 3.0 standard on systems running Microsoft Windows

Server 2008 and Microsoft Windows Vista.

The

Managing EMC Celerra for the Windows Environment technical

module provides detailed information on managing SMB protocol

Unfortunately the official docs are a bit short on the details for SMB2.0 - I'll ask the doc department if they can add more details

mholzhauer · Answer

Hi Rainer,

thanks a lot for answering so fast. I will take a look into these documents right away. But since i have an additional question regarding supported features I'll ask again; are the following windows 7 features supported with the celerra and if so, how:

- transparent caching (the possibility to use the local cache of a client to speed up the read operations)

- dfs-read only (the possibility to use filesystem replications with read-only access rights for the users)

The primary question is, if these windows protocols can be used with a celerra. If that's not possible it would be nice to know wether there is any alternative way to implement these features.

Thx in advance,

Markus

umichklewis_ac7b91 · Answer

Not using DFS-R, the 2003 servers are only using DFS. The root is a standard AD DFS, but the leafs are pointed at the CIFS share. This "appeared" to work normally, as we shutdown the 2003 servers to move them between data centers (twice) and users "appeared" to be able to get to files without incident.

Even if it wasn't worked as I thought, I'm glad we no longer use this - I much prefer ReplicatorV2 and a nice flowchart to failover between Celerras!

umichklewis_ac7b91 · Answer

Correct me, if I'm wrong, but can't a Celerra successfully participate as a "leaf node" in a DFS replication setup? I used to replicate from my Win2k3 fileservers into a CIFS server, until I retired the older boxes (and the data). Hopefully, that was actually supported, and didn't just work!

Karl

Rainer_EMC · Answer

are you really sure you are replicating from a Windows server to the Celerra using DFS-R (aka FRS) ?

Rainer_EMC · Answer

sure - thats the DFS-N namespace - Celerra just works fine there as a leaf node

The actual DFS-R replication wont work - AFAIK it depends so much on Windows and NTFS internals that I doubt anyone besides Microsoft will be ever going to implement it

I've also heard from customers that managing a DFS-R setup with more than a few replications isnt fun ....

mholzhauer · Answer

Dear Rainer,

first of all, regarding your questions about the two features i tried to describe:

- transparent caching: see also "http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd637828%28WS.10%29.aspx"

- dfs read-only: see also "http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/R2-better-together.aspx"

I hope these links help you to understand my request.

Regards,

Markus

Celerra

Celerra Fileserver, which Windows features are supported

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