Help with Storage Gateway in cached mode

Question

Hello,

We have installed the AWS SGW into our HyperV environment and attached it to AWS and also given it a 500GB cache drive.  So far so good.  We now need to create the S3 buckets to store the data, once this is done how do we apply the Activate Directory permissions to the folders and files?

From what I read is once I create the S3 buckets I can mount these to an on premise file server and this will allow me to map drive to users Windows PCs and apply permissions?

To stop the cache drive filling up I was going to copy all the data to the S3 buckets direct using the AWS CLI, then just use Robocopy for the deltas to the mapped drives on the server.

Does this sound about right?

Thanks

Answer

Hi, after creating the SMB file share for the underlying S3 bucket on your file gateway, you can map the file share on Windows as network drive. Then, you can apply Active Directory Windows ACL permissions on the folders/files from the Windows explorer or through PowerShell. Please check below documentation for using Windows ACLs on the SMB file share.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/filegateway/latest/files3/CreatingAnSMBFileShare.html
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/filegateway/latest/files3/smb-acl.html

I understand that you are concerned about filling the cache disk, please note that file gateway uploads data from its cache disk to S3 asynchronously. You can use CachePercentDirty CloudWatch metric to monitor any dirty data pending upload to S3 from the cache disk. Depending on the size of your working dataset and size of the files being written to gateway, you can size the cache disk to maximum of 64 TB.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/filegateway/latest/files3/monitoring-file-gateway.html#understanding-file-gateway-metrics

You can use AWS CLI method to copy initial data to S3 and then use Robocopy through file share to copy changes. Alternatively, you can also consider looking into AWS DataSync for the initial copy to S3. However, using these two methods you wouldn't be able to retain any existing Windows ACLs on your data. To retain existing ACLs, you would need to use Robocopy and copy only through the gateway using SMB file share.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/datasync/latest/userguide/how-datasync-works.html#onprem-aws

Help with Storage Gateway in cached mode

Relevant content