SAN Drive as mounted drive

[Sean_BI]

Dear QV team -

I truly need some assistance urgently. 

The qv ver 12 is installed on win 2016 physical server. the qv  is a cluster  license of 2 nodes.

Installation directory is D:\ where the QMC root folder is mounted. This folder where dashboard boards are saved are shared to node 2. 

Now, i have the SAN drive volume attached to server and this SAN drive (E:\) is shared to node 2 by creating a windows based mapped drive as a short cut to node2. 

Now, in QMC when i re-point the ROOT FOLDER and searched the shared folder (where dashboards, qvw are located) it is visible under  "My Network Places" . 

I need to know if this approach is right, as the "documents folder" in the SAN will cause any issue like any latency, corruption of files or any unknow behavior that qlik server will cause.

Note: i;ve used UNC path along with $ symbol while pointing in QMC under root folder.

[jwjackso]

If you are using NTFS Authorization, make sure your service account has full control of the SAN drive.  Check if the service account can change permissions on the published QVWs.  If it cannot change permissions on the SAN drive, the QVW will be published with default permissions and be visible to everyone on the AccessPoint.

If the service account cannot get full control of the SAN drive, look at using DMS Authorization.

[Sean_BI]

Thanks jack for your response. 

If you look at my attachment,  in node 1 where SAN drive (E:\) is mounted, contains a Folder by name "Mydashboards" is shared with another node2 within in the network where qv is installed. Hence, the folder is mapped with node2 and showing under "Network Locations".

The reason for doing this is my QV application is in clustered node. 

Note: The authorization in my QMC is "DMC'

Note: The rootfolder configured in QMC should point to SAN location or the network drive i.e "SANCHECKDC" . The UNC path in the root folder will be \\10.0.0.1\e$\Mydashboards.

Is this approach acceptable where .pgo, .qvw, .tshared, .shared files are shareable in a QV cluster.

Or is there any other way to achieve. 

Note: there is not another SAN mounted in node2. 

Rgds,

Sean.

[jwjackso]

We tested using NetApp for our storage in clustered QlikView environment and did not see any performance problems.  We used fully qualified UNC in the configuration, we did not use a mapped drive.

Our problem was that our server team did not grant our service account full rights on the NetApp share.  That was why I cautioned about testing permissions.

[Brett_Bleess · Accepted solution]

Sean, be careful using 'drive$' in the UNC paths, you have no control over those given they are admin shares, it is better to create an actual new share, so you can be sure the network share permissions and the NTFS rights are correct and will not change on you due to unknown circumstances.  Just wanted to point that out, but otherwise you did fine here, this is what we recommend you do.

I would check the Resource Monitor on the server attached to the SAN and check the Disk Activity and in particular the Response time, be sure that is not getting above 4ms for any length of time, if that looks good, you should be in good shape, but if the response times are much higher than that on a regular basis, you could have some issues.  About the best I have, shout if you have further questions but hopefully this helps further clarify things.

Oh, one other thing, keep in mind the Windows File Service will be sucking up resources on the server acting as the file server, so be sure to take that into account in your performance tuning...  If that server is a VM, you may have to add some more CPU cores at some point etc. to be sure the File System can handle things along with the other Qlik services running on that node.  Hopefully that makes sense.  

Regards,
Brett

[Sean_BI]

Thank you Brett  for rescuing me on time. 

I've reconfirmed on network share permission ($ usage) with the network team and is ok now. 

I will be observing the disk response time for a week to ensure they are within recommended levels. 

Regarding windows file share service, the qv is installed on physical win server 2016, with 72 core and 512 GB ram, Intel (R) Xeon(R) Gold 6150 CPU @ 2.70 GHz. Hopefully this should ensure a good response and utilization. However i will keep an eye on this as well. Thanks for highlighting on this.  

Rgds,

Sean.