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Introduction Increasing availability is a key concern with computer systems. With all the consolidation and virtualization efforts under way, you need to make sure your services are always up and running, even when some components fail. However, it’s usually hard to understand the details...

Ned Pyle, a Senior Escalation Support Engineer with the Directory Services team at Microsoft, has just started a new blog series focusing on DFS Replication. Here’s how he introduces it: Hello folks, Ned here again to kick off a new five-part series on DFSR. With the release of Windows...

Overview This blog post covers a few different ways to consolidate multiple SMB file servers and keep exposing the consolidated file shares under the old share paths. Scenario Let’s say you currently have 3 file servers named file1.contoso.local, file2.contoso.local and file3.contoso...

Quick blog post to let you know that information about the Best Practices Analyzer (BPA) for Windows Server 2008 R2 File Services has been published. It includes several rules for the configuration, operation, performance and security of the SMB, NFS, DFS-N, DFS-R and FSRM. Get detailed documentation...

During a recent internal conference, someone asked me about how DFS-R (DFS Replication) in Windows Server 2008 R2 secures its communication. I wasn’t sure at the time, so I talked to a few people that work with DFS-R and spent some time looking into that. It turns out that DFS-R uses security above...

The presentations from SNIA's SDC 2009 are now publicly available for download. This SNIA event happened in Santa Clara, CA last September and the decks are now publicly available, after being restricted to conference attendees for a few months. Out of the dozens of presentations, I wanted to highlight...

I get a number of questions regarding reference information for DFS Namespaces (also known as DFS-N). I gathered here the main links that can get you started on the subject: Here are my own blog posts on DFS Namespaces (all updated for Windows Server 2008 R2 and including domain V2 namespaces): ...

The DFS-N test team has completed some extensive Performance and Scalability testing and we wanted to share some of the results. It includes results on standalone namespaces, "2000 mode" domain namespaces and "2008 mode" domain namespaces, under Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008 and Windows...

Introduction In this blog post, we’ll showcase the flexibility you have with DFS-N by showing three distinct ways that you could design a namespace. Note: If you’re not familiar with DFS-N, please read this blog post first: http://blogs.technet.com/josebda/archive/2009/03/10/the-basics-of-the...

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is hosting the 6th Storage Developer Conference (SDC) in the Hyatt Regency in beautiful Santa Clara, CA (Silicon Valley) on the week of September 14th. This event is also co-located with the CIFS/SMB/SMB2 Plugfest. For those working with storage technologies...

Powershell is a command line interface for Windows that offers a very powerful and flexible model. It is now a feature included with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, not an optional download as before. In this post, I show some sample commands that can help you understand some of the basic features...

Introduction The Distributed File System Namespaces (DFS-N) service is a role service of the File Service role for Windows Server. For a basic description of DFS-N, start with http://blogs.technet.com/josebda/archive/2009/03/10/the-basics-of-the-windows-server-2008-distributed-file-system-dfs.aspx...

Microsoft released the File Server Migration Toolkit version 1.2 (FSMT 1.2), which will help you migrate file shares from computers running Windows NT 4.0 Server, Windows 2000 Server, Windows 2003 Server, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Storage Server 2008 to computers running Windows 2003 Server, Windows...

Introduction Whenever you’re deploying Windows Server DFS-Namespaces, you will need to figure out how many servers will be required. Since I moved to the role of DFS-N PM, I noticed that the specific information on how many namespace servers you need is something that isn’t clearly posted anywhere...

The most common administration activities related to DFS-Namespaces can be performed using the “DFS Management” MMC. This will show up under “Administrative Tools” after you add the DFS role service in Server Manager. You can also add just the MMC for remote management of a DFS...

1 – Overview This blog post details the behavior of Windows Server 2008 DFS-N (Distributed File System - Namespaces) clients by looking at network traces. The main goal here is to show the interaction between a DFS-N client, a domain controller, a namespace server and a file server. These traces...

Overview In this blog post, we’ll cover the basics of the Distributed File System (DFS) in Windows Server 2008, which offers users simplified access to a set of file shares and helps administrators easily maintain the file server infrastructure behind those file shares, including options for load...

The presentations from the SDC 2008 are now publicly available for download. This SNIA event happened in Santa Clara, CA on September 22-25 and the decks are now available to everyone, after being restricted to conference attendees for a few months. Out of the dozens of presentations, I wanted...

I had the pleasure to deliver yesterday a TechNet Webcast on "Windows Server 2008 File and Storage Solutions", which also included details on the upcoming Windows Server 2008 R2. That webcast is now available on-demand (for streaming or download), via http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail...

If you were unable to attend my presentation on " Windows Server 2008 File and Storage Solutions" during TechEd 2008 EMEA, I will be delivering it again as a TechNet Webcast: Title : Windows Server 2008 File and Storage Solutions (Level 300) Event ID : 1032399197 Language : English. Product : Windows...

Microsoft just announced the release of Microsoft File Server Migration Toolkit 1.1, which will help you migrate file shares from computers running Windows NT 4.0 Server, Windows 2000 Server, Windows 2003 Server and Windows Server 2008 to computers running Windows 2003 Server and Windows Server 2008...

Heads up for an upcoming webcast on the new file service features in Windows Server 2008 by Drew McDaniel, a Senior Program Manager with the Microsoft Storage Solutions Division (SSD). Here's a short description: "The Windows Server 2008 operating system contains a lot of changes to core file services...