DFS on home areas

[FN-GM]

Hi

 

I am looking to possiblily use DFS on home areas for some more HA. there was a similar thread before but there where allot of posts to say against it, but allot of those didn't use it. I am making this thread for the sole reason to see who actually does or had and just for your advice tips and gotchas.

 

All our servers are server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 clients.

 

Thanks

[deano]

We use DFS for our primary schools that we support. A local server to each of the schools runs a primary namespace and then back at my school, i run a single DFS server that has the secondary locations added. Works really well and i only have to backup the server onsite and not any remote ones.

 

We run a HA Hyper V cluster with blades and SAN, and only utilise one file server for all shares, home folders, desktops, start menus etc. Some people might say that there is HA because of the Hyper V setup using clustering, but argument is that even though there is HA for the server itself, what about the Server OS and possible corruption to the system files. My resolution to this is to run DFS instead of the single file server, and have it stand alone from the blades.

[FN-GM]

We use VMware that has HA for our file server. So similar to yourself. We have multiple DC's so why do we not do the same with files.

 

Thanks for the input

[pritchardavid]

We use to do this, worked fine. But we only had one server for it, the thought was if we ever changed the fileserver name, we wouldn't have to worry about shortcuts links being wrong. Just haven't set this up since we moved to our new domain, haven't decided if I will yet.

[FN-GM]

We use to do this, worked fine. But we only had one server for it, the thought was if we ever changed the fileserver name, we wouldn't have to worry about shortcuts links being wrong. Just haven't set this up since we moved to our new domain, haven't decided if I will yet.

 

You could always setup a DNS record such as "home-areas" point it to your file server. Then point your shares to this DNS name. If you move it just tweak the DNS record.

[deano]

I suppose that it stems from the days of Server 2003 DFS. It had the right idea, but just never worked (well!). In Server 2008 DFS-R, they have got it right and it works really well. I say that with setups such as yours and mine, if you have the storage available to duplicate your homefolders then do it. Just make sure that one of the servers in the DFS namespace sits outside of the clustered setup if you can, that way you can prepare against a potential SAN failure

[psydii]

Microsoft’s Support Statement Around Replicated User Profile Data

Link: http://blogs.technet.com/b/askds/archive/2010/09/01/microsoft-s-support-statement-around-replicated-user-profile-data.aspx

 

"The purpose of this article is to clarify exactly which scenarios are supported for user data profiles when used with DFSR, DFSN, FR, CSC, RUP, and HF. It also provides explanation around why the unsupported scenarios should not be used. When you finish reading this article I recommend reviewing http://blogs.technet.com/b/askds/archive/2009/02/20/understanding-the-lack-of-distributed-file-locking-in-dfsr.aspx

 

Update 4/15/2011 - the DFSR development team created a matching KB for this - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2533009"

 

 

HTH

Edited May 28, 2012 by psydii