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Great points - thanks kevinhsieh. I thought DFS could only tie in shares from other servers, but I guess you can just map the UNC path to a local drive ? Does that work. If that is the case I agree that domain DFS would be the way.....
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Great points - thanks kevinhsieh. I thought DFS could only tie in shares from other servers, but I guess you can just map the UNC path to a local drive ? Does that work. If that is the case I agree that domain DFS would be the way.....

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DFS just ties together UNC paths. In this case the DFS root would be on domain controllers, and everything would point to different shares on your single server, though you can also tie together your other file servers as well.
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DFS just ties together UNC paths. In this case the DFS root would be on domain controllers, and everything would point to different shares on your single server, though you can also tie together your other file servers as well.

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Hi there, I am bulding a 2008 R8 Fiel server as a VMware VM. the aggregate data being managed by this FS is failry large - about 5.5TB. It is a mix of Video, Photo, Music and other file data.<br />
I need to break up the volumes in order to keep the VMDKs at a manageable size (&lt; 1TB, so the DSs can stay at 4MB blocksize), yet i need to presetn the data - ideally - as a single share to the outside world - at least to the users, backup is a different story. All DSs will be iSCSI conected to an openfiler box.<br />
I was wondering if there are opinions out there how to solve this best - with mounted volumes or directory junction points, or some other way, and what the pros and cons are......<br />
<br />
Thanks for any input !
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Hi there, I am bulding a 2008 R8 Fiel server as a VMware VM. the aggregate data being managed by this FS is failry large - about 5.5TB. It is a mix of Video, Photo, Music and other file data.
I need to break up the volumes in order to keep the VMDKs at a manageable size (< 1TB, so the DSs can stay at 4MB blocksize), yet i need to presetn the data - ideally - as a single share to the outside world - at least to the users, backup is a different story. All DSs will be iSCSI conected to an openfiler box.
I was wondering if there are opinions out there how to solve this best - with mounted volumes or directory junction points, or some other way, and what the pros and cons are......

Thanks for any input !

Volume Mounts vs Directory Junction

VMware, a software company founded in 1998,  was one of the first commercially successful companies to offer x86 virtualization. The storage company EMC purchased VMware in 1994. Dell Technologies acquired EMC in 2016. VMware’s parent company is now Dell Technologies.

VMware has many software products that run on desktops, Microsoft Windows, Linux, and macOS, which allows the virtualizing of the x86 architecture.  Its enterprise software hypervisor for servers, VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi), is a bare-metal hypervisor that runs directly on the server hardware and does not require an additional underlying operating system.

VMware

Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2, based on the Microsoft Vista codebase, is the last 32-bit server operating system released by Microsoft. It has a number of versions, including including Foundation, Standard, Enterprise, Datacenter, Web, HPC Server, Itanium and Storage; new features included server core installation and Hyper-V.

Windows Server 2008

Computer data storage, often called storage or memory, is a technology consisting of computer components and recording media used to retain digital data. In addition to local storage devices like CD and DVD readers, hard drives and flash drives, solid state drives can hold enormous amounts of data in a very small device. Cloud services and other new forms of remote storage also add to the capacity of devices and their ability to access more data without building additional data storage into a device.