December, 2005

[Updated on 11/27/06 to clarify areas where customers commonly have questions] The most frequent DFS Replication questions are about replication limits. The answer is, as you might guess, not as simple as some arbitrary hard-coded limit. And just so...

With R2 launching, we have a number of new case studies on Microsoft.com that highlight how customers use DFS Namespaces and DFS Replication, as well as other technologies, in Windows Server 2003 R2. Check them out! --Jill

A customer recently asked how performance is affected when you use File Server Resource Manager in R2 on large volumes. Based on our testing, here’s what to expect: Quotas: Internal benchmarks have consistently shown I/O performance cost of less than...

Hello everyone, we've got two events this week for the R2 branch office technologies--a webcast on Wednesday and a follow-up chat on Friday. These will cover DFS Replication and DFS Namespaces in R2. TechNet Webcast: Administering and Maintaining the...

A customer noticed that after deleting a replicated folder from a replication group, some subfolders under the DfsrPrivate folder (which is under the local path of the replicated folder) remained on the volume. This behavior is by design--DFS Replication...

We've released a short operations guide for using Dfsradmin.exe, the command-line tool for DFS Replication in Windows Server 2003 R2. Although the tool itself provides command-line help for its syntax, this guide is useful if you need examples of how...

“How do I size file servers?” is a perennial question, and we recently had a mail thread in response to a customer question about sizing file server clusters. We do have some guidance about server cluster capacity planning and file server RAM and CPU...

On several occasions we've seen customers enable DFS Replication on the root of a volume, such as C:\. Although DFS Replication supports configuring a volume root as the local path of a replicated folder, we don’t recommend this configuration for the...

Looks like we've published a whitepaper on how Microsoft's own IT department uses Diskpart. Here's the summary: The Microsoft IT group regularly uses the Diskpart.exe utility to dynamically increase disk volume capacity on servers running Microsoft...

One of my fellow MS bloggers, Michael Kleef, often posts about DFS Replication. He's been very involved in the R2 Beta and should have lots of good experiences to share. Here are a few of his recent posts on DFS Replication. http://blogs.technet.com...

File services chats anyone? We've got two chats this week and one next week. See this link for details: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/chats/default.mspx . I'm also in the process of planning chats and webcasts for the next six months. Have...

[Updating with minor edits for clarify] Customers frequently ask about the “primary member” designation in DFS Replication. Although this sounds like it could be a single master setting (meaning that content only originates and changes on this member...

I've asked folks who will be blogging here to send me their bios to introduce themselves, and the bios are slowly trickling in. Here are a few: Dan Lovinger joined Microsoft in 1995 and is currently the technical lead for the DFS team. Since joining...

A question recently came in on the bloghotline from a customer who asked about implementing scalable storage on server clusters and how to avoid downtime when storage needs to be extended. One of our cluster PMs, Elden Christensen, replied as follows...

The Best Practices for Using Volume Shadow Copy Service with Exchange Server 2003 doc has been updated. A highly recommended read for IT Pros who use VSS as part of Exchange backup and restore. -Jill