How do Dynamic Home Directories improve performance?
Applies to
- ONTAP 9
- Data ONTAP operating in 7-mode
- CIFS Home Directories
- User profiles can be in used in VDI (Hyper-V) or Citrix Home Profiles using folder redirection.
Answer
- Take as an example "\\filer\home\user18456". With a regular FlexVol or FlexGroup setup, the sequence goes as follows for all Windows clients:
- Negotiate Protocol Request and Response.
- Session Setup Request and Response.
- Tree Connect \\filer\home and response.
- Create requests and closes.
- A Find of \\filer\home for user18456 with pattern of *.
- Finally a Close and then a create call of user 18456:
- Notice, the Find Request above with "Pattern: *", means this will return all 18456 entries. ONTAP has to process each single entry and transmit all that associate data to the Windows client.
- Dynamic Home Directories simplify this and ONTAP only returns the single user's folder. ONTAP still has to search all 18,456 folders, but it is only doing a simple find, not reading the entire contents of the folder to transmit to Windows. This is less CPU computationally intensive compared to a typical home directory, and this is how performance is improved with Dynamic Home Directories.
Additional Information