Create a Filesystem to present to a Windows server on Unity

Good morning everyone.

Welcome to another in the How To series with myself. Richard Hornsby today, very quick, simple one, just looking at how to create a file system and then present that to Windows Server using our Unity platform. So with that said, let's get on and do that.

So hopefully you can see now I'm on a Unity storage array just at the dashboard, but it's quite simple. First thing we'll do, just to make this make a little bit more sense, if we'll just check what we have configured. So here I've got, already got my kind of storage solution. There it is. I'm on the 4k here.

What else we got in here? We need to make sure that we've got some storage pools, which we have, mine's called Rich, after my good self and But what we haven't got are any file systems. And we haven't got any LUMs, for example. Okay, so it's very much a blank canvas. Okay, so we need to set up a file system. So we're just going to go into storage, select file systems, and then from here, all we need to do is select, add a file system.

Okay, now we can call this what we want. So I'm going to call this demo, for example. Okay, that can be anything you like. So if you wanted to call that, you know, if you want to present that to a particular department, you could call it HR, engineering, whatever you need to call it doesn't really matter, okay, so we're going to click on Next.

Now from here, what we're doing is basically thin provisioning. So you've got all of this space available to you, but you may only want to create a certain size of file system. So as an example, I'm just going to do that at 10 and 10 terabytes. Now quota. That's quite a useful thing. Again, if you're kind of an MSP or an IT department that likes to have a cost model. So, you know, you charge different departments for the amount of storage that they need. Quotas could really come in handy. So, for example, you might create a 10 terabyte file system, but only want, you know, a certain department to use X amount of storage, and that's where you set that up. Okay, so we're not going to do that today, you know, we'll just leave that as unlimited as it were.

And record size can be important, depends on the performance criteria. But if you're using a particular database or application, and you know the block size, the record size, then then go ahead and match that up. And I would always recommend you have data compression unless you know there's a specific reason you don't need to. So I'm going to go ahead and click on Next.

Now here different types of file systems. So SIFS, we're going to use that because we're presenting out to a Windows Server. Okay?

NFS, if you are presenting to a Linux operating system, access based enumeration is simply saying, right? We're going to restrict the access to the files or the directories on that file share to be, you know, kind of Windows permission. So if you've got a user and they create some files, and you only want them to see their files, then if you take that option, then that will will all be set in place for you. Okay, so let's go ahead and click on next.

Snapshotting. I'm going to disable that. There are other videos I've done some videos on snapshotting, both immutable, not immutable. So I'm going to head, go ahead and just untick that option. Then I'm going to click on Next.

Now this is if you want to enable active archive. So what that really means is there's a wonderful Nexsan product called Assueron. Okay, so if you don't know of it, or if you haven't heard of it, then do look it up. It's, it's a fantastic and compliance solution, rock solid, you know, immutable storage. It's, yeah, it's air gaps. I could, I could talk about it for a long time, but I'm not, so I'm just going to skip over that bit and click on Next, just a summary of what it is we're about to do.

I'm going to head and click, click on create.

So away it goes. Doesn't take too long, and you'll see the progress bar kind of quickly head through. And then once we've done that, we'll we'll just go ahead and do the kind of the Windows bit. We'll just present it to the to the operating system.

Shouldn't be too much longer.

There we go. So there you see, it's created that kind of that UNC path, okay, so you can, at this point, you can say, No, I'm finished. Or you can add another one, if you want to. So I'm just going to go ahead and get my mouse under control and copy that link.

There we go.

Got it? Okay, so let's head over to Windows. I'll just bring this onto the screen. Here we go. So pretty standard stuff, but I'm just going to right click on there and do map and network drive, bring that back on the screen. Apologies, I'm working on several different screens, so I'm going to call that. You can call anything you want, but yeah, W, drive is fine. And then you just paste in that UNC path, okay. You can use different credentials again, if you want to kind of tie this down and make it you know. A little bit more difficult to get to you can I'm just going to leave it nice and open. So I'm just going to click on finish.

It will present that drive.

There it is. I've got a nice new W drive ready for me to go, simple as that. So again, a very short and sweet video, but hopefully you found that useful, and thank you for joining me.

Thank you.