Micro Focus Storage Manager 5.1 for Active Directory includes performance enhancements, new functionality, and addresses several outstanding issues.
The Storage Manager 5.1 Engine is backwards compatible with the Storage Manager 4 and 5 Event Monitor. However, these older Event Monitor versions are not compatible with the new scope feature.
The Storage Manager 4.x and 5.0 Agents are not compatible with the Storage Manager 5.1 Engine. If you’d like to take advantage of the faster data copying feature in Agents, you will need to upgrade them.
The Storage Manager 5.1 Engine requires the SMAdmin 5.1 administrative interface. If you attempt to log in to a 5.1 Engine with an older version of SMAdmin, it will result in an error. Likewise, if you attempt to log in to a 5.0 Engine using SMAdmin 5.1, it will also result in an error.
Micro Focus recommends that you update all Storage Manager components at your earliest convenience.
Storage Manager 5.1 for Active Directory includes new versions of all components. When upgrading the Engine, you are required to update the SQL Server database schema.
After you have established a trust relationship, can manage data in a secondary forest.
Multi-threaded data copying improves performance for any management task involving data movement.
Managed paths are no longer restricted to the name of the sAMAccountName attribute value, which might or might not be a descriptive name of the user or group. The Managed Path Naming Attribute allows you to choose from among multiple attributes for the user or group folder name.
This new policy type allows for multiple groups to access a shared group folder, with each group having different sets of permissions to the group folder.
There are new Action Blocks for the Managed Path Naming Attribute and Multi-Principal Group Storage policies.
Rather than burdening the Event Monitor in observing all events in an Active Directory forest or domain, this new feature lets you “scope” the segments of the forest or domain that the Event Monitor will monitor. A scoped segment of the forest or domain might include specific containers or groups.
Entering an ampersand (&) character into a Filter Action Block's rule description no longer removes all data from the Action Block.
A storage resource whose DNS entry does not contain the forest root domain is no longer filtered from the path browser.
Copying data through a copy operation from a path with an ampersand (&) character in the share name no longer results in a failed copy operation.
If multiple source and target folders are selected, deselect the Skip Open Files option.
Beginning with version 4, Storage Manager for Active Directory exclusively uses DNS FQDNs for server names in all UNC paths set in and by Storage Manager. This is a change from Storage Manager 3.x and earlier, where NetBIOS names were used (though a configuration file-only option to use DNS names existed in Storage Manager 3.1.x). This change complies with the Microsoft recommendation, as Microsoft slowly attempts to phase out NetBIOS and WINS.
This problem manifests itself in two scenarios:
Folder Redirection has already been in effect where the UNC path value for the home folder uses one form of the host name, and then the UNC path of the home folder attribute is modified to refer to the same actual location but with the host name in the other format (for example, switching from NetBIOS to DNS FQDN).
Switching the UNC path from server and share, regardless of the host name format that was used, to using a DFS name space where the DFS link being used resolves to the same location as the original UNC path. For example, switching from share \\server\\share\\pathremainder to using the DFS name space \\some-domain.com\dfs-name-space\link\path-remainder, where they resolve to the same location.
The root-cause for the problem is that the Folder Redirection code in Windows, prior to the hotfix, was not resolving the old and new UNC path values for the home folder to determine if they refer to the same location on disk. Unlike Storage Manager, which makes this determination via its “path overlap detection” functionality, the Folder Redirection code makes a bad assumption that it can unconditionally delete the files on the “old” path after it copies them to the “new” path and thus, it ends up deleting files that should not have been deleted.
These Windows bugs, which can result in loss of data in the redirected folders or the entire redirected folder, are described in the following Microsoft KB articles:
“You are unable to update the target location of offline file shares in the Offline File client side cache without administrative permission in Windows Server 2008 R2 or in Windows 7” http://support.microsoft.com/kb/977229
“After you apply a GPO to redirect a folder to a new network share, the redirected folder is empty on client computers that are running Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008” http://support.microsoft.com/kb/977611
These KB articles specifically apply to users logging on through Windows Vista or Windows 7 computers, as well as users logging on interactively on Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2. However, users on other operating systems may be affected as well. Fortunately, both of the KB articles above include links to hotfixes that help resolve these issues.
While this is not a Storage Manager issue by itself, Storage Manager’s exclusive use of DNS FQDNs in UNC paths can exacerbate this problem, or introduce it into an environment that was previously exclusively using NetBIOS naming for servers and using folder redirection. If your environment uses folder redirection, we strongly recommend reading the KB articles above and applying any relevant hotfixes before you manage storage with Storage Manager. In fact, we strongly recommend applying these hotfixes if you use folder redirection in your AD environment with the affected operating systems, even if you are not managing user storage with Storage Manager. Microsoft’s continuing push to move away from NetBIOS and WINS might eventually introduce this issue into your environment with or without Storage Manager installed.