Creating NAS shares in the D5000.

Introduction:

While the D5000 supports both NAS and iSCSI, many prefer the advantages of NAS in that multiple users can collaborate and work with the same files. This Knowledge Base article shows how to create a NAS share in the D5000.

Prerequisites:

This assumes that the D5000 is unconfigured or has sufficient free disks or pool space to create a new NAS Share.

Terminology:

The D5000 terminology is different from that of other Promise VTrak subsystems. The new terms will be briefly described here.

  • Pool: a group of disks in a RAID configuration. 
  • Volume: An iSCSI logical volume created in a pool. Cannot be used for NAS. Volumes and NAS Shares can be created in the same pool.
  • NAS: Network Attached Storage.
  • NAS Share: A NAS logical volume created in a pool. Cannot be used for iSCSI. Volumes and NAS Shares can be created in the same pool.
  • NAS User: Since NAS supports multiple users, user accounts are necessary, user accounts can be local or through Active Directory, OD or LDAP.
  • NAS Protocols: CIFS/SMB, NFS and FTP are supported.
  • Drive Bound: The preformance of a RAID Pool is dependant on the number of disks (more disks is faster), type of disks (SSD is faster than SAS is faster than SATA), and RAID type (RAID0 is faster than RAID 5, etc...) and the number of Volumes/NAS Shares in a pool. The more NAS Shares and Volumes in a pool, the slower the preformance.

Creating a Pool:

First, you must login to WebPAM as administrator, the default password is 'password'.

From the Pool tab on the left, click Create New Pool.

 

Name the Pool, select the Media Type, select the drives (click on the drives in the image, they will turn blue and be added to the Selected Drives list,  select the RAID level and Stripe Size (recommended, use the default stripe size of 64k), then click Submit.

Please note that a RAID0 pool will be created quickly, but any other raid level must be synchronized (the parity must be written) and this can take a very long time of you have many large drives in the Pool. The Pool can be used immediatly, but it won't be redundant until the synchronization is complete.

You will then have a new synchronizing Pool.

Creating a NAS Share:

Click the NAS Share tab on the left then click Create a New NAS Share.

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