DFS and NLB

[Molenski]

Hello,

I have a question regarding running DFS with NLB. The situation is that at present, we have a server which contains shared files with data saved by our users and also have a standby server to which the data is copied via a script. If something were to happen to the first server then the users would switch to using the second server. This is all fine and dandy but it seems the way forward would be using DFS. I would also like to build NLB into this, whereby if one of the servers falls over the other is immediately available instead of a delay while users switch over. We have no option to cluster. Does this seem like a reasonable idea? I have done a small amount of digging and it seems the idea maybe frowned upon! Pros? Cons?

Thanks in advance.

Molenski

 

[58sniper]

You don't need NLB with DFS. Users will switch over to alternate servers if the first isn't available. This is all mentioned in the documentation.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/

 

[Molenski]

Yes, but if one of the servers goes down for some reason? I'm not talking about DFS 'redundancy', I'm talking about server redundancy.

 

[58sniper]

Makes no difference as long as multi DFS endpoints are listed in the namespace servers field in DFS.

Also, NLB is not service aware. So if the DFS service stops on one server, NLB won't know, and will keep directing traffic to it. NLB shouldn't really be used. For anything.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/

 

[Molenski]

Hi there. Thanks for getting back. I see what your'e saying now...at the moment a dns alias is used to point to the data server but with dfs the namespace is used...ok. Mmmmmm...so (and I'm talking about Server2k3r2) does the dfs namespace need to be AD intergrated for the sort of setup I'm talking about? Thanks again.