DFS // Limitations

[Marcus Wolf]

Hi,

Domain-based DFS can host 5000, stand-alone DFS 10000 links due to the size
limitations.

We have 6000 employes who are currently using olf-fashioned drive mappings.
To make it easier for them we would like to migrate to DFS.
So we plan to set up a stand-alone DFS on a four-node-cluster, with lot's of
drive space on a SAN.

Each user has its on "home-directory" which makes ist 6000 links,
also we hve something like 500 departments, which makes it another 500 links
for departement related folders.
Then we have folders for projects, something like another 2000 and finally
we have special folders which gives us a total of 11000 something folders
e.g. links.

There is no chance for us to argue about the folder structure. Based on that
what would be a good and easy solution for us to implement DFS???


Regards Marcus

 

[Brendon Rogers]

Why do you want to create separate Dfs links for each home share? Why not
have \\domain.com\DfsRoot\Home as a Dfs link then put the individual home
directories underneath that?

With Dfs configured as above you can then map the users home drive to
\\domain.com\DfsRoot\Home\UserA

 

[Sto Rage!]

We have a similar issue, except that we only have about 800+ users
We have multiple servers in different locations hosting the home folders,
hence having a single DFS link for home is not an option, we will need to
have individual links for each user.
In terms of reducing the number of links, we were told we could have a DFS
link point to another root, meaning

\\domain.com\DfsRoot\Home --> \\domain.com\HomeDFS\Home (This root will be
hosted on a different set of servers obviously & could be a standalone DFS
root too)
We haven't verified this yet. Will this work??
So currently our DFS design on paper looks like this

\\domain.com\DFSRoot\
home points to
\\domain.com\homeDFS\Home which will have 800+ links for user's home
directory
Departments --> having 50+ department
links on the main DFS root
Projects --> having 100+ project links
on the main DFS root

Makes Sense?

BTW, what will you be using to manage this massive DFS layout? Micro$ofts'
DFSutils and DFSCMD tools have such primitive user interface, it defeats all
the benefits you get from DFS.

-G

 

[Mukul Gupta [MSFT]]

1. Yes, that should work fine. DFSUTIL.exe and DFSCMD.exe are command line
tools. Use DFSGUI.MSC (DFS UI interface) to manage domain and standalone
based roots. This GUI is available on server machines.
2. It seems that you don't have many links 800+50+100+.. something like
~1500, this should be fine in one DFS namespace. Just wondering why you
want to put cascaded DFS (DFS-->another DFS)

For your information:
1. 5000 is the recommeded limit for domain-based DFS,
2. 10,000 is recommeded limit for standalone DFS in Win2000
3. 50,000 is recommeded limit for standalone DFS in Win2003

--
Thanks
Mukul [MSFT]

PS: Please post DFS related queries in newsgroup
microsoft.public.win2000.file_system. Please use "DFS" in subject to make it
immediately noticeable.

Disclaimer: This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers
no rights

 

[Mark Hall]

I would recommend as another poster that you use cascading roots from a
domain based root to several standalone roots. Server 2003 Enterprise
Edition can support multiple roots (standalone or domain) on one box and
standalones have been pumped to 50,000.

I would also recommend looking at a product from NuView that really takes
DFS to the next level. I have used the product for sometime now, and I
think that it would really help you out. As an example, they the ability to
synchronize the link structure across multiple standalone roots (kind of
like domain based roots), and with this technology you could setup a domain
based root that has a multi-targeted link multiple standalone roots. This
would give you the fault tolerance, scalability and single namespace that
you are looking for in your environment.

Just FYI.