VAST providers let you manage users and groups on the VAST cluster without the need to connect an external authentication and authorization provider, such as Active Directory or LDAP. You can create multiple VAST providers and associate each provider with one or more tenants. This feature is useful for:
Adding users when you do not have an external provider configured. (This is an option for NFS and S3 access.)
Adding users who are not defined on external providers who specifically need S3 access. (Users who are defined on external providers can be assigned S3 permissions without being added to the local provider.)
Adding POSIX attributes for a user who is defined on Active Directory but only has SMB attributes there and is not defined in an additional configured external provider. In this case, use the same user name as is used on Active Directory so that the user database will associate these attributes to the same user.
Adding users to manually override incorrect or outdated attributes on external providers.
In case of any conflict between user attributes on any external authorization provider and the VAST provider, the VAST provider attributes override the non-VAST provider. For more details, see Overview of User Management and Authorization.
Local users are created with a UID and user name that you supply manually. A unique SID is generated by the cluster for each local user. You can specify the user's leading group and other groups by name, using names of manually added groups.
Note
VAST provider user entries are not included in S3 backup.