Configuring Active Directory or Windows workgroup support

You can configure HCP to support Microsoft Active Directory (AD) or Windows workgroups. HCP cannot support AD and Windows workgroups at the same time.

You can configure HCP to support Active Directory authentication. An authenticated AD user can use any HCP interface that requires authentication, such as the System Management Console, Search Console, or namespace access protocols provided the user has the applicable HCP permissions.

A Windows workgroup is a named collection of computers on a LAN that share resources such as printers and file servers. User accounts are specific to each computer in a workgroup. No authentication is required for access to the shared resources.

When you configure HCP to support Windows workgroups, you provide the name of the workgroup in which you want CIFS-enabled namespaces to be shared resources. If HCP is on the same LAN as the computers in the workgroup, all CIFS-enabled namespaces are automatically exposed in the workgroup. HCP namespaces are displayed as a single shared resource with a name in this format:

tenant-name_namespace-name 

For example, finance_accounts-receivable). The default namespace is displayed as two shared resources, fcfs_data and fcfs_metadata.

If the CIFS protocol is configured to require authentication for access to a given namespace, that namespace cannot be accessed through a workgroup.