Consolidating 2 file server into 1 across two sites

[chrisjako]

Hi All,

 

After a bit of advice, I manage 2 sites connected via 1GB fibre - from our 2500 staff and students only a handful of say 100 bodies actually travel between sites for login access

 

These file servers contain user home areas, network drives and profiles - once consolidated into one server I want them to replicate with each other and serve users on site A for server A, site B for server B - however if server A was to go down users would automatically pull data from the site B server

 

How would I go about doing this? i'm thinking of something along the lines of similar DFS replication that happens with the domain controller - or is there a better more reliable method?

[PyROm]

We are a one site school with 2 file servers. We use dfsr to replicate files between them live and dfsn to handle auto failover (both managed from same mmc). Dfsn would let you setup costs/priorities etc for which servers users default to eg. Site a uses server a, however you need to consider shared areas and if 2 users save altered versions of the same file at the same time on 2 different servers, as file locking (nateively) only works on the local server. We arnt a good example for you on that, as we are one site we just default all shared areas to the same server, maintaining file locks.

[CyberNerd]

GlusterFS/Samba combo will deal with the file locking problem. It's a pretty tried and tested method so I'd probably go with this.

https://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/GlusterFSonCentOS

 

Here's a list of distributed filesystems to choose from:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_file_systems#Distributed_file_systems

orangeFS looks interesting

[Sagima]

I'd probably do it with DFS. I've had it here for a while and although it takes ages to do its initial replications once it gets going it can be completely ignored.