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DFS Server 2008

I am going to setup a DFS environment and I was wondering if anyone had a thought on whether or not to use an existing server 2008 file server or is it best to create a new server that just has DFS on it?
I am going to setup a domain DFS environment and probably a mesh topology. I have existing file servers that just do file and print. Is it best practice to put DFS on it's own machine or can it co-exist on a file server?

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kevinhsieh

There are two related technologies called DFS; DFS replication (DFS-R) and DFS Namespace (DFS-N).

If you want multiple servers to have the same files on them, that is achieved via DFS-R, and that needs to be running on the servers storing the files (your file servers).

DFS-N provides a unified namespace such as \\domain.local\dfs\folder1, \\domain.local\dfs\folder2, etc. The files on those shares can be on a single server, folder1 can be on one server while folder2 can be on another, or folder1 and folder2 can be DFS-R replicated to multiple servers and clients can access files on the closest server, or there can be other servers available for DR purposes. DFS-N is best deployed on domain controllers. If your file server is also a DC, you can have both services running.

DFS-R and DFS-N don't have any native global file locking capabilities, so you need to make sure that two workstations don't try to edit the same file on multiple servers at the same time.

I always use DFS-N, even for single server environments. The season is that you can upgrade to a different file server later without changing UNC paths because the UNC path uses the domain name, not the server name where the file are stored.