Close requests fail on data mover when using Riverbed Steelhead appliance

We recently had a problem with one of our corporate applications having file close requests fail, resulting in 200,000+ open files on our production data mover.  This was causing numerous issues within the application.  We determined that the problem was a result of our Riverbed Steelhead appliance requiring a certain level of DART code in order to properly close the files.  The Steelhead applicance would fail when attempting to optimize SMBV2 connections.

Because a DART code upgrade is required to resolve the problem, the only temporary fix is to reboot the data mover.  I wrote a quick script on the Celerra to grab the number of open files, write it to a text file, and publish to our internal web server.  The command to check how many open files are on the data mover is below.

This command provides all the detailed information:

/nas/bin/server_stats server_2 -monitor cifs-std -interval 1 -count 1

server_2    CIFS     CIFS     CIFS    CIFS Avg   CIFS     CIFS    CIFS Avg     CIFS       CIFS
Timestamp   Total    Read     Read      Read     Write    Write    Write       Share      Open
            Ops/s    Ops/s    KiB/s   Size KiB   Ops/s    KiB/s   Size KiB  Connections   Files
11:15:36     3379      905     9584        11        9      272        30         1856     4915   

server_2    CIFS     CIFS     CIFS    CIFS Avg   CIFS     CIFS    CIFS Avg     CIFS       CIFS
Summary     Total    Read     Read      Read     Write    Write    Write       Share      Open
            Ops/s    Ops/s    KiB/s   Size KiB   Ops/s    KiB/s   Size KiB  Connections   Files
Minimum      3379      905     9584        11        9      272        30         1856     4915   
Average      3379      905     9584        11        9      272        30         1856     4915   
Maximum      3379      905     9584        11        9      272        30         1856     4915   

Adding a grep for Maximum and using awk to grab only the last column, this command will output only the number of open files, rather than the large output above:

/nas/bin/server_stats server_2 -monitor cifs-std -interval 1 -count 1 | grep Maximum | awk ‘{print $10}’

The output of that command would simply be ‘4915’ based on the sample full output I used above.

The solution number from Riverbed’s knowledgebase is S16257.  Your DART code needs to be at least 6.0.60.2 or 7.0.52.  You will also see in your steelhead logs a message similar to the one below indicating that the close request has failed for a particular file: