Student files load balancing

[HCC]

Hi all,

 

I have been given some budget to increase the space allocated to staff and student home shares and a public share. I would like to have two servers and load balance\replicate between them so If one server has the problem the other will continue to work over.

I'm aware DFS could do this, but it's not really designed for it, and is a bad idea.

 

Does anyone else already do this, and can suggest a solution? I want to spend most of the budget on hardware so ideally wants to be something that is included in windows or is low cost to add. SAN hardware etc would be too expensive.

 

Thanks,

[jamesfed]

DFS and DFS-R are actually probably your best options in this case - you would have two storage servers with equil hardware and then use FQDNs for your network shares which would then balance/replicate out onto both of your storage servers.

 

The latest updates to DFS in Server 2008 R2 have completely thrown out the old file/folder limitations in previous versions so you are pretty much free to work with whatever you want.