Before adding or generally managing the file systems, you should understand the prerequisites and requirements. You should also refer to the related prerequisites and limitations when adding a cache device.
Network services
- To add an SMB file system, you must have an Active Directory server defined to NAS Bridge.
- To add an NFS file system, you must have either an Active Directory server or a DNS and NTP server defined. You normally configure these network services as part of deploying and initially configuring the NAS Bridge node.
Cache devices
Each file system must be associated with a cache device. You can use either of these two approaches when assigning file systems to cache devices:
- Associate many file systems to a single cache device (N:1).
- Associate one file system to a single cache device (1:1).
While the 1:1 model requires more drives and more effort to configure, it provides a high degree of isolation among the file systems. This isolation improves performance and helps limit the impact of a cache device problem.
Therefore, the best practice is to use the 1:1 model and dedicate a cache device to each file system. Given this, you should do following:
- Define a different cache device for each file system that you plan to add.
- Associate each file system with a dedicated cache device.
StorageGRID Webscale buckets
To add file systems, you must have a StorageGRID Webscale system active and defined to NAS Bridge. Defining or identifying the StorageGRID Webscale API Gateway Node is normally done as part of initially configuring the NAS Bridge node.
Every file system is placed in a single, dedicated StorageGRID Webscale S3 bucket. When adding a file system, NAS Bridge searches for the named bucket and uses it if found. If the bucket is not found, NAS Bridge creates it. Note that when adding a file system, the named bucket might already exist for the following reasons:
- A previous file system used the same bucket name, but the file system had been removed (orphaning the bucket).
- Someone with access to the StorageGRID Webscale system created the bucket outside of NAS Bridge, using an S3-compliant tool.
Note: When a NAS Bridge file system is removed, the bucket is not modified or deleted from the StorageGRID Webscale system. Therefore, if you subsequently add a file system using the same bucket, the previous file data is retrieved from the bucket and exported through the new file system.
Attention: Although you can use an S3-compliant tool to view and retrieve the NAS Bridge client data in the StorageGRID Webscale S3 bucket, data corruption or loss might occur if you attempt to delete, modify, or add objects to an S3 bucket used by NAS Bridge.
Attention: Data corruption or loss will occur if you assign the same S3 bucket to file systems from different NAS Bridge instances.
Attention: Make sure that any ILM rules associated with buckets handled by the NAS Bridge do not purge or delete objects. All delete operations are expected to be performed at the share/mount point level.
Known limitations
There are some known limitations that apply when creating the file systems.
- Setuid and Setgid bits
- During a chown operation by a mounted NFS client, the setuid and setgid bits are not saved in the corresponding StorageGRID Webscale object. Instead, these bits are cleared as part of any operation that would normally modify them.
- SMB file attributes
- There are some SMB file attributes that are not accepted or saved by NAS Bridge. The following attributes are not supported:
- FILE_ATTRIBUTE_OFFLINE (0x1000)
- FILE_ATTRIBUTE_TEMPORARY (0x100)