DFS Replication

[lmrogers]

Morning Everyone,

 

I am migrating file servers using DFS Replication from Server 2008 R2 to Server 2016. The data is replicating fine but there is something really odd happening. The hard drives on the servers do not seem to be reporting the correct space available or used.

 

Has anyone seen anything like this before?

 

Cheers

[FN-GM]

Do you have de-duplication enabled?

[lmrogers]

No, de-duplication is not enabled on any server and they both seem to report the wrong space.

[3s-gtech]

The staging folders may be taking up a big chunk of space as the replication works its way through. Volume shadow copies may also be having a big impact!

[mtillbrook]

I'm going to be doing the same process in a few weeks time so I'll defintely be interested in hearing the answer to this!

 

As an fyi - I hate DFS! Every time I've dealt with it, it has never worked properly!!

[lmrogers]

Once everything has been replicated and the replication group has been removed though will that free up the hard drive space again? I dont have volume shadow copies running on either server.

[3s-gtech]

It can be an absolute pig. It can also be a joy and never give any issue. We're somewhere in-between - DFS works well. DFS-R has sometimes thrown a hissy fit - we have one share that we have permanently un-published from the topology (so clients never connect to it but it still replicates) because it was unreliable and would often fail to sync to the other hosts. In general it's a great system - when implementing it, it can help to pre-stage the replication using Robocopy or similar. Check, test, check, pray.