FILE REPLICATION BETWEEN DC01 and DC02

[ITJS2015]

Hi Everyone

 

I am looking for some advice on what Is the easiest way on setting up replication between dc01 and dc02

 

At the moment we have AD,DNS replicating between both servers but I would like our data for all the students to be access if dc01 went down for more than a day

 

Obviously dhcp would also need setting up between them but the main issue would be student loss of time with ICT

 

 

Can anyone help ?

[Katy]

2012 R2 supports proper DHCP redundancy (rather than just the old "80/20 split scope") so that's easy to sort. For file replication if you're feeling brave try setting up DFS, your shares are then sat at the domain level eg \\domain\students rather than on a specific server, and DFS will load balance the requests over the two servers (or send all requests to one server if one is down).

 

Not used DFS since 2003 R2 where it wasn't the most reliable thing in the world but probably more due to the speed of the network and the amount of data we had back then.

[ITJS2015]

I have setup DFS a few weeks back but the problem was that when ever dc01 went down I could not access the data on dc or when it had been replicated over before it was shutdown for a test.

 

I may have missed something out

[Katy]

Not sure how well it would work being on the DCs, as it needs DNS to query for which servers are running DFS in the first place - I've always had separate file servers. Unfortunately can't remember much about setting it up as I've not used it in the last decade...

[sted]

I have setup DFS a few weeks back but the problem was that when ever dc01 went down I could not access the data on dc or when it had been replicated over before it was shutdown for a test.

 

I may have missed something out

how were you accessing it \\dc01\share\file or \\domain.local\share\file ?

 

as if dc01 is down its down if the data is replicated by dfs to dc02 \\domain.local should work

[3s-gtech]

DFS (Distributed File System) isn't replication, it's about using non-server specific addressing e.g. domain.school/shares set up as your share root, so that when you lose a server or change one of them out the address stays the same. What you're looking at is DFS-R. When setup correctly, this will do what you need. It is a bit of a monster if it plays up, but otherwise it's fairly simple to set up and reliable.

[ITJS2015]

That's will probably some it up, I think it was \\dc rather than \\domain.local

 

If if this was setup correct and my dc01 was down for more than a day how does the student logins pick up the data one dc02 even though the AD profile path points to dc01

 

Any suggestion?

[Katy]

If if this was setup correct and my dc01 was down for more than a day how does the student logins pick up the data one dc02 even though the AD profile path points to dc01

You have to change the paths in AD to point to \\domain.local\share instead of \\dc01\share

[ITJS2015]

Hmmm that make it a lot more obvious and a school boy error to miss out on lol

 

I will try what katy has mentioned

 

Thank you

[3s-gtech]

As above. You'll need to change things like profile paths, share paths etc to get the benefit. You need the FQDN rather than NETBIOS name - as you've found, just going to \\DC won't work, it needs to be \\domain.school (I can't put domain.local, the thought of a .local AD domain still gives me shivers) as the DFS root.