DFS Advice

[_techie_]

Hi,

 

I am in the process of doing some development work towards our Server 2008 R2/Windows 7 Domain, and as part of the process, I thought I would get around to making some infrastructure improvements.

As part of this, I was looking at setting up a DFS share/namespace for our Windows 7 Profiles.

 

We aim to have two DC's running together, one which will have our Profiles on which I am doing now in testing (nearly there by all rights!).

As part of setting up the Namespace, I have a few questions:

 

Does the DFS Server/Service need to be installed on one of the servers actually doing the Replication, or can it be elsewhere?

What is the point of the Namespace folder? Is this so I can use one namespace that actually has multiple pieces of content? Some clarification would be good here?

 

Thanks

Mark

[Domino]

As an example,

 

we use our DCs as our nameservers, and the file servers for replicas. This means if the file server local to you is down, then you can still access the name space to get to another copy of the data. A namespace can contain multiple subfolders, these all appear at the same root, even if they're located on seperate machines.

 

ALL servers running with replication or namespaces need the DFS role installed.

 

Also, if you're going to run DFSR, run the 2008 version. and make sure it's actually running it, not the 2003 compatible one. it is MILES better.

[_techie_]

Thanks, thats great.

I will simply wanting this to be for basic replication purposes, rather than tying a load of folders together for organisational purposes, so a simple DC Replication Group, with one namespace shoud be good I think.

I can see you could have a very easy way of tying lots of shares together for say different departments using DFS, which would be great!

 

Thanks for your advice, I will get cracking!

[3s-gtech]

I recently moved our main shared file storage to DFS-R. It was very simple and worked well - had to move the existing server to 2003 R2, the new server had 2008 R2 on. I then created the namespace, and migrated each shared folder to it, where it automatically synced. Been running well since (touch wood). Now I just have to upgrade the 2003 server to 2008 R2.