HP CIFS Server Requirements and Limitations

HP CIFS Server Installation Requirements

HP CIFS Server requires approximately 67 MB of disk space for installation on the HP-UX 11i v1 machine and 157 MB of disk space on the HP-UX 11i v2 machine. The HP CIFS Server is composed of the following components:

On an HP-UX 11i v1 System

On an HP-UX 11i v2 System

	NOTE: The CIFS Server source code files are not required for execution of HP CIFS Server. You can choose not to install them or you can remove them after installation at the following location: /opt/samba_src

HP CIFS Server Memory Requirements

An smbd process is usually created for each new connection. Each smbd requires about 2 MB of system memory on 11i v1 and about 4 MB on 11i v2.

The smbd process may now also allocate memory for specialized caching requirements as needed. The size and timing of these memory allocations vary widely depending on the client type and the resources being accessed. However, most client access patterns will not trigger such specialized caching. System administrators should routinely monitor memory utilization in order to evaluate this dynamic memory behavior.You may need to adjust HP-UX server memory configurations to accommodate these changes when upgrading from previous versions

Refer to Chapter 13, "HP-UX Configuration for HP CIFS" in this manual for more detailed information.

Software Requirements

The following describes software requirements:

Swap Space Requirements

Due to the one-process-per-client model of HP CIFS, perhaps the most stringent requirement imposed on the system is that of swap space. HPUX reserves a certain amount of swap space for each process that is launched, to prevent it from being aborted in case it needs to swap out some pages during times of memory pressure. Other operating systems, only reserve swap space when it is needed. This results in the process not finding the swap space that it needs, in which case it has to be terminated by the OS.

Each smbd process will reserve about 2 MB of swap space and depending on the type of client activity, process size may grow up to 4 MB of swap space. For a maximum of 2048 clients, 4 * 2048 or about 8 GB of swap space would be required. Therefore, HP recommends configuring enough swap space to accommodate the maximum number of simultaneous clients connected to the HP CIFS server.

Memory Requirements

Each smbd process will need approximate 2 MB of memory on 11i v1 and 4 MB on 11i v2. For 2048 clients, therefore, the system should have at least 4 GB of physical memory on 11i v1 and 8 GB on 11i v2. This is over and above the requirements of other applications that will be running concurrent with HP CIFS.