it depends what you understand as "disrupt connectivity"
a reboot - no matter how fast - will always be kind of disruptive on the lower levels
and a client will have to at least re-establish the TCP connection
The question is more how much of that is visible to the client OS and application
NFS clients using default hard mounts will just see a pause in I/O but no error to applications
The OS and protocol stack will of course re-establish the connection, recover locks, ....
for CIFS clients it depends on the application and OS
Windows itself will automatically reconnect
cluster aware application that retry internally should be ok
simple applications like copying files via explorer.exe can stop and show a "Try again" dialog
For those application that really require transparent failover - like SharePoint or Hyper-V over SMB shares you can enable SMB CA (Continuous Availability) per share
then they will also just pause and resume I/O similar to NFS
See the NAS white paper and Microsoft details about CA in SMB3
Why dont you just try it ??
all an upgrade is doing is a SP reboot - which you can easily do even from the GUI
If you dont want to use your hardware Unity as VSA will show the same behaviour
"As far as I understands how it is configured, and how it is supposed to work, it will be a disruptive activity".
However, this depends greatly on your specific setup.
A note from the NAS capabilities doc (page 16) about restarting NAS servers (which is similar to the failover/failback associated with SP reboots during an upgrade):
"Note that restarting a NAS Server causes a brief outage to clients that are not running SMB3+CA or NFS."
Does enabling CA on the shares that are already mounted require any action from the client side: remounting, etc.? Will it be beneficial to enable CA on both SMB/CIFS and NFS shares?
CA is only SMB specific and it can be enabled only during the creation. Even though it may be allowed to make the change online, please check if this is recommended to do. For Isilon SMB shares it is not recommended to online while we were on 8.0.0.4
Rainer_EMC
4 Operator
•
8.6K Posts
1
December 7th, 2018 17:00
it depends what you understand as "disrupt connectivity"
a reboot - no matter how fast - will always be kind of disruptive on the lower levels
and a client will have to at least re-establish the TCP connection
The question is more how much of that is visible to the client OS and application
NFS clients using default hard mounts will just see a pause in I/O but no error to applications
The OS and protocol stack will of course re-establish the connection, recover locks, ....
for CIFS clients it depends on the application and OS
Windows itself will automatically reconnect
cluster aware application that retry internally should be ok
simple applications like copying files via explorer.exe can stop and show a "Try again" dialog
For those application that really require transparent failover - like SharePoint or Hyper-V over SMB shares you can enable SMB CA (Continuous Availability) per share
then they will also just pause and resume I/O similar to NFS
See the NAS white paper and Microsoft details about CA in SMB3
Why dont you just try it ??
all an upgrade is doing is a SP reboot - which you can easily do even from the GUI
If you dont want to use your hardware Unity as VSA will show the same behaviour
AndreD Dell
Moderator
•
239 Posts
2
December 7th, 2018 03:00
Hi ad_astra,
You are correct here:
"As far as I understands how it is configured, and how it is supposed to work, it will be a disruptive activity".
However, this depends greatly on your specific setup.
A note from the NAS capabilities doc (page 16) about restarting NAS servers (which is similar to the failover/failback associated with SP reboots during an upgrade):
"Note that restarting a NAS Server causes a brief outage to clients that are not running SMB3+CA or NFS."
We will reach out to the SolVe folks (https://solveonline.emc.com/solve/products) also to have a note added to the upgrades procedure.
We will also add a note to the upgrade guidance KB: https://support.emc.com/kb/490297
Have a look at h this KB also:
https://support.emc.com/kb/521982
Step 5 shows a warning about "failing over" a NAS server which is very much what happens during a code upgrade also.
Hope this helps.
Thanks
Andre @ Dell EMC
victory_is_mine
2 Intern
•
236 Posts
0
December 8th, 2018 05:00
Thank you this is awesome info!
Does enabling CA on the shares that are already mounted require any action from the client side: remounting, etc.? Will it be beneficial to enable CA on both SMB/CIFS and NFS shares?
SKT2
2 Intern
•
1.3K Posts
0
December 11th, 2018 08:00
CA is only SMB specific and it can be enabled only during the creation. Even though it may be allowed to make the change online, please check if this is recommended to do. For Isilon SMB shares it is not recommended to online while we were on 8.0.0.4