SMB support overview

The SMB support for IBM Storage Scale allows clients to access the GPFS file system by using SMB clients with their inherent SMB semantics.

The following features are provided:

  • Clustered SMB support

    SMB clients can connect to any of the protocol nodes and get access to the shares defined. A clustered registry makes sure that all nodes see the same configuration data, that is, for the client it does not matter to which of the CES nodes the connection is established. Moreover, the state of opened files (share modes, open modes, access masks, and locks) is also shared among the CES nodes so that data integrity is maintained. On failures, clients can reconnect to another cluster node as the IP addresses of failing nodes are transferred to another healthy cluster node. The supported protocol levels are SMB2 and the base functionality of SMB3 (dialect negotiation, secure negotiation, encryption of data on the wire).

  • Export management command

    With the mmsmb command, IBM Storage Scale provides a comprehensive entry point to manage all SMB-related configuration tasks like creating, changing, and deleting SMB shares and administering the global configuration. The mmsmb command follows the notions of supported options, that is, a limited set of SMB-related options that are proven useful. Moreover, the Microsoft Management Console can be used to administer SMB shares. For more information, see mmsmb command.

  • SMB monitoring

    The monitoring framework detects issues with the SMB services and triggers failover if there is an unrecoverable error. Moreover, the mmhealth and mmces commands provide quick access to current and past system states and aid to diagnose issues with the SMB services on the CES nodes. Issues that are detected and causing failover are, for example, GPFS daemon failures, node failures, or SMB service failures. For more information, see mmhealth command and mmces command.

  • Integrated installation

    The SMB services can be installed by the integrated installer (toolkit) together with the CES framework, and the NFS, S3, and Object protocols.

  • SMB performance metrics

    The SMB services provide two sets of performance metrics that are collected by the performance monitor framework. Thus, not just the current metrics can be retrieved but also historic data is available (at some lower granularity). The two sets of metrics are global SMB metrics (like number of connects and disconnects) and the metrics for each SMB request (number, time, throughput). The mmperfmon query tool provides access to all SMB metrics by using predefined queries. Moreover, metrics for the clustered file metadata base CTDB are collected and exposed by using the mmperfmon query command. For more information, see mmperfmon command.

  • Cross-protocol integration with NFS, S3, and SMB

    IBM Storage Scale allows concurrent access to the same file data by using unified file (such as, SMB, S3, and NFS), and object interfaces.

  • Authentication and ID mapping

    The SMB services can be configured to authenticate against the most popular authentication services MS Active Directory and LDAP. Mapping MS security identifiers (SIDs) to the POSIX user and group IDs on the file server can either be done automatically by using the automatic or by using an external ID mapping service like RFC 2307. If none of the offered authentication and mapping schemes matches the environmental requirements the option to establish a user-defined configuration is available. The mmuserauth service create command can be used to set up all authentication-related settings. For more information, see mmuserauth command.