Enabling unicode on celerra when fielsystems are exist

agraws1,

Firstly welcome to the forums and above all thank you for being an EMC customer.

Have a look at the following KB article.:

emc143160: "How to enable Unicode support on a Data Mover"

[...]

You can enable Unicode support on a Data Mover with existing file systems, using either CLI or the Celerra Manager.

Caveat: If the file systems consist of pure ASCII file and directory names, this will be seamless.  But if file systems have files and directories with characters higher than 128, this can cause problems.  In this case the file system will need to be converted using appropriate code page.  The best practice is to have Unicode enabled prior to file system creation.

If non-ASCII characters are used in filenames or directory names, Contact the EMC Customer Support Center or your EMC Customer Service representative for technical assistance. Please quote the solution ID

[...]

Thank you for your reply.

I had looked into above primus before however things are not clear.

This is production box with multiple filesystem already exported through NFS protocol. We are not sure what type of characters are used in files.

We are now configuring cifs on box. So enabling unicode at this momonet is safe? Will it impact existing NFS filesystems?

Since ASCII is a subset of Unicode (or rather to maintain backward compatibility the first 128 characterss are the same), if your files and directories only use these characters, then as noted in the KB article, it will be seamless.  There are good references online to the (7-bit) ASCII table.  One way of looking at it is if you only ever used the characters you see stamped on, for instance, a standard English (US 101) keyboard you'll likely be fine.

Now I will mention I haven't personally had to enable Unicode on an array while already in production so haven't had to research any quick way of verifying this (short of going through every file and folder name but of course we wouldn't ask you to do that).  I'd suggest if you haven't already, open up a ticket with support and reference the KB article above.

Unless someone else has gone through this before?