Exploring ShareFile’s ‘StorageZones’ Services
I was looking for more information on what makes a ShareFile StorageZone ‘tick’, and couldn’t find much that got into the nuts and bolts of this great feature. This post is intended to share some general information about the various StorageZones controller services, including their basic functionality, and some hidden configuration settings.
For the scope of this post, I’m going to focus on the three Windows services that are installed as part of a StorageZone v2.1 Controller. Each service is installed off the root of the IIS site as follows:
- File Cleanup Service – Citrix\StorageCenter\SCFileCleanSvc\FileDeleteService.exe
- File Copy Service – Citrix\StorageCenter\SCFileCopySvc\FileCopyService.exe
- Management Service – Citrix\StorageCenter\s3uploader\S3UploaderService.exe
In each of these directories are the service’s .NET .config file, which can be modified to enable logging, and adjust hidden configuration settings. For example, if you open FileDeleteService.exe.config, you’ll see the following XML by default:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration>
<appSettings>
<add key="ProducerTimer" value="24"/> <!--Time interval in hours-->
<add key="DeleteTimer" value="24"/> <!--Time interval in hours-->
<add key="DeleteTimer" value="24"/> <!--Time interval in hours-->
<add key="Period" value="7"/> <!--No. of days to keep data blob in active storage after deletion-->
<add key="logFile" value="C:\inetpub\wwwroot\Citrix\StorageCenter\SC\logs\delete_YYYYMM.log"/>
<add key="enable-extended-logging" value="0"/>
<add key="BatchSize" value="5000"/></appSettings>
<startup><supportedRuntime version="v4.0" sku=".NETFramework,Version=v4.0"/></startup></configuration>
As you might have guessed, setting enable-extended-logging to 1 will enable verbose logging after the service is restarted, writing to the specified logFile path. This setting is the same for the other services, and can come in handy when troubleshooting issues with a StorageZone.
In order to really understand what these services were doing, I decided to poke through the source code by decompiling the services’ assemblies using a free utility called DotPeek. Here’s a summary of what I found for each service’s functionality within a StorageZone Controller.
File Cleanup Service (FileDeleteService)
The name says it all here, as this service’s sole responsibility is managing data deletion from the storagezone storage repository. Since all of the data stored by ShareFile is in BLOB format, deleting a file through the ShareFile front-end doesn’t actually delete it from the storage; it simply ‘de-references’ the data, and marks it as ‘expired’.
This ‘expired’ data will remain in the storage repository until it’s ‘cleaned up’ by the File Cleanup Service. This is why if you look at a folder’s recycle bin, you’ll see the files are still listed and available for recovery until the configurable cleanup period lapses (7 days by default).
Citrix recommends configuring this cleanup period to match the backup schedule of your storage device so that data is removed shortly before or after they’re backed up. This design also allows for data to be recovered even if it’s not in the recycle bin, by using the “Recover Files” function in the StorageZone section of ShareFile’s Admin page.
Here are the .config extended settings for this service, along with their default values:
- ProducerTimer = 24 Time interval in hours
- DeleteTimer = 24 Time interval in hours
- Period = 7 Number of days to keep data in active storage after deletion
File Copy Service (SCFileCopySvc)
This service is what allows the StorageZones controller to communicate with ShareFile’s cloud infrastructure (by way of the ShareFile API), and allows users to upload and download files directly to and from a customer’s on-premise storage.
When a file is uploaded, ShareFile’s servers connect to the controller through this service to initiate an HTTP(S) POST request, allowing the data to be stored directly to the StorageZone. The service also converts files to and from the ShareFile’s proprietary format, converting files to BLOB data for uploads, and converting BLOB data back to the original file for downloads.
The service also has a configurable timer value (the default is 10 seconds key=”CopyTimer” value=”10000″ ) that controls how often retries are attempted for jobs that previously failed due to connectivity issues.
Management Service (S3Uploader)
Last but not least, the poorly named Management Service, which only really ‘manages’ transferring files to and from Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service. This service uses Amazon’s AWS SDK for .NET to take care of the data transfer, and is what allows you to migrate data to and from ShareFile’s storage, and the StorageZone.
There are a couple of configurable settings for this service as well; here they are with their default values:
- httpMethod = https Transport method; secure or non-secure
- HeartBeat-Interval = 5 Interval in minutes
- Recovery-Interval = 3600 Interval in seconds
Well, I hope this post is useful for anyone who is using, or planning on using, ShareFile’s StorageZones feature. Feel free to share any other insights or thoughts in the comments!
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