Creating a CIFS volume

This document describes how to create a CIFS volume using a Zadara Storage VPSA.

This document is a quick, step-by-step guide to getting started with a VPSA. For an in depth review see the VPSA users guide.

Audience

This document is designed for an audience with a basic familiarity shared storage and NAS concepts.

Time

It will take most administrators about 5 minutes to complete the steps.

Prerequisites

A VPSA with a RAID group and a pool
- Click here for the Setting up your VPSA guide

The Process

Create a CIFS volume

Create your CIFS volume -

Following the steps in the Setting up your VPSA guide connect to your VPSA. On the left click ‘Volumes’, then ‘Create’ and ‘Create NAS share’ -

In the Create Block Volume dialog -

Give your new volume a name.
Pick an initial size for the volume, you can always expand it later. The initial size must be equal to or less than the free space left in the pool.
Set a export name. By default this will be the same as the volume name.
Select the ‘SMB Only’ option.
If you want to allow anonymous CIFS users select the ‘SMB - Allow Guest Access’ option.
Select the ‘SMB - Enhanced Windows ACL’ option.
If you want your data encrypted at rest you first need to set a master encryption password. On the left click ‘Controllers’, then click ‘Encryption’. Generally encrypted volumes operate ~5% slower than the same non-encrypted volume. If your VPSA is going to have a lot of encrypted volumes we will recommend a larger VPSA.
By default your volume will be snapshotted per the default snapshot policies. You can check or update these policies by clicking ‘Snapshot Policies’ on the left.

That’s It! You’ve created a CIFS volume.

Next Steps -

Creating an iSCSI block device

Creating a NFS volume