Question

DFS Server Priority

Asked by: RyanMielke

Hello, everyone.

I am in the process of setting up a building-to-building DR setup, and I am thinking about using DFS for our file server.  Our group sits in a building on our medical campus (our old server room is here), which is connected to our main campus (8 miles away) by multiple 10GB fibre links.  The university has a top notch colo, and we have moved our primary servers to this location, due to power, cooling, and other problems with our former server room.

My thought is that I would put our file server at the colo, and employ DFS to replicate the data to our "DR" file server, which will sit in our old server room.  Would I be able to configure the clients, though, to point to the colo file server by default?  Though it's physically closer, I would prefer to only use the DR file server for failover purposes, because it will be running on older equipment (server and SAN).

My understanding is that DFS finds the server by the site the server is in, so is that going to throw me off (each campus has a different IP scope)?

Thanks in advance.

Ryan

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Asked On
2009-02-26 at 18:56:39ID24182576
Tags

DFS

,

Server

,

Location

Topics

Windows 2003 Server

,

Windows Server 2008

,

Active Directory

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Answers

 

by: globetrotterPosted on 2009-02-26 at 21:35:39ID: 23752981

Hi,
Do you want your clients to primarily use the first server, but fall back to the other one if the first one is not available (1), or do you just want to have the second one as a backup that never gets accessed by the clients?
(1) For this you can define Target Priority. If the 2 Subnets that you mention are assigned to 2 different sites in AD you would need to set global high (or in the R2 Console - First among all targets) if they are in the same site, you can use Sitecost high (first among targets with equal cost).
(2) For DFS Links you also have the possibility to disable the referrals. In this case the server remains part of the DFS Structure, but the clients will never find out about it. This can be done only for Link Targets. In the (pre-R2) DFS Console right-click the link target and choose disable.

 

by: RyanMielkePosted on 2009-02-26 at 21:49:49ID: 23753032

Hi globetrotter,

Thanks for the information.  Just to clarify (in case you need it to add anything), I'm looking at scenario one.  I need the second one to be available to clients, but only if the colo (or the connection to the colo) fails.

Now even though the two buildings are in different subnets, I was wondering if I even needed to put them into different AD sites - one, since the colo will only contain servers, and two, since we're running at extremely high speeds.  Am I off base?

Also, my current file server (which I haven't moved) is a 2003 R2 box.  I'm curious if there are any benefits of having the colo file server, as well as the DR server, run 2008 64-bit.  Does 2008 offer any improvements in the DFS realm?  I hear going 64-bit will help with large data sets (which mine are), but that could be marketing fluff.


Thanks again,

Ryan

 

by: globetrotterPosted on 2009-02-28 at 01:06:00ID: 23762682

Hi Ryan,

The Way you describe it I don't think you need to place the different subnets in diffferent AD Sites.

For DFS it doesn't really matter which OS the file servers have on which you place the actual data. By the time we reach those DFS has done its job and we connect in the same way as we do if we go directly to the share.

For your DFS Root Server W2k8 does bring 3 new functionalites for DFS, but for Domainbase DFS they can only be used when the Domain Functional Level has been raised to 2008 and when all DFS Root Servers are W2k8.
Once you fullfil above criteria you can recreate your DFS Namespaces as V2 DFS Namespaces. Then you gain the following functionality.
1. Access Based Enumeration - filtering which Links get displayed to a user depending on his rights
    careful, this can use a lot of CPU.
2. Number of Links that could be created in a Domain Based Namespace were limitied to somewhere around 5000 in V1 Namespaces. This limit does not exist in V2.
3. Cluster support: DFS Namespaces in Windows Server 2008 supports creating stand-alone namespaces on a failover cluster from within the DFS Management snap-in.
Note  
DFS Replication service is not designed to coordinate with cluster components, and the service will not fail over to another node.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753479.aspx

Regarding the 64-bit I do not have any experience so I am not sure how big your performance improvements would be.
For DFSN the Namespace Servers I don't think it makes any difference. But if you replicate data between servers with  DFSR replication, I would expect some benefit there.

 

by: RyanMielkePosted on 2009-02-28 at 01:15:09ID: 23762716

Perfect explanation.  Thanks again for all of your help!

Ryan

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