Working with Smartconnect Aliases rather than CNAME

[Rob Hersh]

We recently came across a KB article (KB334238) that states Isilon does not recommend using CNAMES and instead to use smartconnect aliases with delegation records (DNAMES i think). So far I haven't been able to get this to work and was wondering if anyone else uses aliases and dnames records?

Our setup is as follows:

company.com - is the main domain. We then created subdomains that forward all requests to the specific cluster

prodcluster.company.com -> forwards to the SIP address

We then are able to create whatever smartconnect zone names under those domains listed above without any additional changes to DNS:

smb.prodcluster.company.com - subnet0:pool0

What we've done from there is create CNAME so we didn't have to add prodcluster.company.com to our client's search context:

CorpFileServer.company.com -> smb.prodcluster.company.com (this has seemed to work for a couple years but lately have seen some flaky behavior that doesn't occur if we use the smart connect zone name).

What I can't seem to get working is the alias setup where say:

dnametest.company.com -> SIP Address and an alias is created under one of the smart connect zones.