Experience about life without Novell Client?

Question

Hi,
got anyone a wider experience about OES Infrastructure without Novell
Client and W7 Workstations?
We didn't need absolut highest performance but an absolut stable and
reliable Environment (24h Healthcare).
- Is Performance with CIFS Access to OES NSS Cluster Ressources comparable?
- Is availability comparable (in special Cluster migrations, Filelocking
on Files)
Today we run ~250 XP Workstations on OES2
Cluster/Filesharing/iprint/Zen7 and Groupwise.
Now we are going to ZCM11 and W7/64bit and think about avoid to use the
Novell Client for Windows to reduce complexity and switch on Client Side
to AD-Domain and use OES Infrastructur only for the "Backend".
Most Novell Services (Groupwise/iPrint) are going to auth to AD too, so
why should we use Novell Client and the NCP Protocol anymore?
Is the NCP Protocoll so much better against CIFS in current OES
Implementations (i'm no Expert in this Things).
Regards
Thomas

Answer 1

On 25.04.2012 06:16, kvishwanath wrote:
>
> Welcome to Novell CIFS !!
>
> To begin with - "OES Infrastructure without Novell Client on Win 7 is
> possible by Novell CIFS"
>
> To answer your specific questions,
> - Yes, CIFS has Comparable performance improvement w.r.t. Novell Client
> in recently released versions like OES2SP3,OES11FP0& Upcoming OES11
> SP1.
> - CIFS service is a cluster enabled, It works seamlessly on cluster
> migration, supports cross protocol lock feature across protocols (CIFS,
> NCP, AFP).
>
>
> In addition, CIFS supports Distributed File Services(DFS), Dynamic
> Storage Technology (DST), backup an many more features. Please refer
> Novell Documentation for more details.
I know this, but in real life there are always pitfalls...
>
> Specific to your infrastructure question of ~250 XP workstations, we
> have scaled CIFS service up to 4000 connections on single server 3 node
> cluster setup. Howe ever we are interested to know more details on your
> setup and infrastructure details further on this.
>
What would you like to know?
Most infos are on my first post.
We get more and more Windows Applikations who need a Windows Server as
Plattform for Services, Shares and Authentication.
In the past we create lokal "system" Accounts on these Applikation
Servers and map there Shares with help of the Loginskripts.
like map use R: \\app-server\files password /user:<systemaccount>
But now we are low on Drive Letters...
So now we think about to bring the Applikation Server and Windows
Workstation into AD-Domain for using same User Accounts/Passworddatabase
and use the UNC Syntax for this kind of Applikations.
Or we use some Applikations/Infrastruktur who use "transparent" Login
with AD Authentication (sp. Citrix) or use this as Authentication Point.
And that's our thoughts about CIFS and Novell Infrastractur in General.
Regards
Thomas