Sailing in Uncharted Waters. A Story of Implementing Apple MacOS X Extensions for SMB2 in EMC Isilon OneFS Server

Starting from MacOS X 10.9 Apple has turned to SMB2 as the preferred protocol for file sharing. Although it was supported earlier it has become the primary file sharing protocol for the OS X platform. In order to keep supporting a number of features specific to OS X file system Apple's SMB2 implementation has been equipped with several extensions and optimisations aimed at maintaining a positive user experience when working over the new protocol. That naturally sets new expectations from the clustered storage vendors because many of their customers are heavy-weight OS X users. Unfortunately, the scarcity of an accurate documentation makes the task more difficult. The talk describes experiences from investigating and implementing some of the extensions in EMC Isilon scale-out clusters to provide a more Apple-friendly SMB2 server.

Learning Objectives

How does MacOS X file sharing translate to SMB2 protocol?
The actual extensions and their implementation based only on publicly available information
SMB2 client behaviour specific to MacOS X
Possible optimisations