As anyone had any experience getting local Mac Workstations to connect to a cloud filer? We have creative folks (adobe users) who might need to collect to a cloud based volume for reasons and I'm seeking out anyone who's dealt with NFS/SMB/Something not coming to me this early in the morning for connections from workstation to cloud. I realize latency is an issue, but how else has anyone done this? Thanks!
#Mac to cloud OnTapp
maiden trellis
faint phoenix
what are you referring to as cloud filer? CVO?
maiden trellis
yes, sorry about that. Want all the bells and whistles of our local hardware, but in AWS.
fresh cradle
I'm not sure I understand exactly what you need, but from our experiences both SMB and NFS work reasonably well with MacOS X. We have customers doing both, and other than the Mac leaving their droppings (.DS_Store files) everywhere like an untrained puppy, I'm not aware of any major issues these days.
maiden trellis
I have a team that has had trouble with complex file operations in the past and am just poking around to see if anyone in this more informal envirornment has had any problems with macs connecting to the cloud. Over the years the same team has had a lot of trouble with adobe files. NFS 4 and SMB 3 improvements on paper should help a lot, but there is still institutional shyness about trying again.
short ermine
Is this cloud with local Macs? Or is it a Mac VM in the same AZ?
Adobe is terrible with caching/buffering of reads, so NFSv3 usually works better. NFSv4.x isn't usually better for performance vs v3 except in certain things (pNFS, etc.).
For SMB you can try increasing the buffer credits, but NFS always does better. Some of it is because we don't support vfruit until 9.12, and something else (dir leasing I believe it is) until 9.15 or 9.16. But part of it is also Apple's SMB stack is just not as evolved as their NFSv3 stack.
NFSv3 is just simpler and just works.
If you want happy users, just being frank here...go NFSv3.
fresh cradle
Adobe is terrible with caching/buffering of reads, so NFSv3 usually works better...
interesting, because today was the EMEA Partner TechMaster and the guys who talked about high performance and AI and stuff said that NFSv3 is still the best if you want maximum performance (with nconnect, of course)
short ermine
IDK if Apple supports nConnect.
But yeah NFSv4.x adds more features.
Not perf
Usually v4 is preferred for ACLs for security, but if you have Adobe you have specific clients anyway so security shouldn't be a big issue needing ACLs.
fresh cradle
well ACLs don't really matter if you use ONTAP with usermapping 😉
short ermine
v4 adds forced locking, and both ONTAP and client OS NFS stacks haven't had as much soak time as v3.
fresh cradle
but yeah, that's basically what we tell our customers too: use NFSv3 unless you need something that is only available with v4