Dell PowerFlex Appliance with PowerFlex 4.x Administration Guide

Multitenancy

NAS servers can be used to enforce multitenancy. This is useful when hosting multiple tenants on a single system, such as for service providers.

Since each NAS server has its own independent configuration, it can be tailored to the requirements of each tenant without impacting the other NAS servers on the same system. Also, each NAS server is logically separated from each other, and clients that have access to one NAS server do not inherently have access to the file systems on the other NAS servers. File systems are assigned to a NAS server upon creation and cannot be moved between NAS servers.

If customers want to put their NAS Server in a private namespace, then they must select a tenant from the drop-down field, to indicate NAS Server is going to be a member of the selected/specified tenant.

• If a customer does not select any tenant while creating the NAS server, then created NAS server will reside in the default namespace.
• Create tenant with unique set of VLAN IDs (exclusive to this tenant and should not be used elsewhere in PowerFlex Manager)
• The NAS server clone action creates a new cloned NAS server which will be attached to the same tenant as the original NAS server.
• File Interface details need to be configured explicitly after creating the clone, as this configuration is not being done in the NAS Clone Creation process.
• Modify NAS Server with Tenant workflow.
  • NAS server object is a private data object for a particular tenant, shifting the object between multiple tenants may not be advisable for security reasons.
  • Currently supporting two types of modify workflow.
    • Default tenant to a specific tenant
    • Specific tenant to a default tenant
    NOTE: Both these operations are possible only if the NAS server is not associated with any File Interface. There may be loss of access to connected NAS clients during dissociate/associate of File interface operation from the NAS server in an existing system.
• PowerFlex file cluster can have up to 4087 tenants.
• 2048 number of NAS Servers can be part of one tenant.
• One NAS Server can be associated one tenant only.
• One Tenant can have up to 4087 VLANs.
• One VLAN can be mapped to one tenant only.
• PowerFlex file tenant can be deleted only if no NAS servers are associated with it.
• PowerFlex file tenants will allow complete network isolation:
  • Two NAS Servers on different tenants may share same IP subnet.
  • There shall be no way to access one NAS Servers shares or exports through another NAS Server that is on a different tenant.
• If PowerFlex system doesn't have any tenants created or user removed all the defined tenants then multitenant feature will not be enforced, which means user can still go without multitenant (default option)