Need some help with DFS. How to aggregate shares into a single folder?

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cyr0n_k0r

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I want to use DFS to aggregate lots of folders into a single share. These folders are spread out across 4 file servers.

Here is my current setup. I have two domain controllers DC1 & DC2. I have a Namespace already setup as \\ad.mydomain.com\root
DC1 and DC2 are both namespace servers for \root

I have 2 folders under \root already. I have \root\apps, and \root\profiles. Both folders are replicated between DC1 and DC2.

Here is where it gets tricky. I need a 3rd folder \root\data
Inside the data folder I need the display about 30 folders.
\root\data\folder01
\root\data\folder02
\root\data\folder03
etc

The problem is, lets say folder01 through folder10 is on fileserver1. They are physically on D:\data on fileserver1. I've tried to add D:\data as a target and it works fine. However the problem is when I want to add folders 11-20 which are on fileserver2. When I add fileserver2 as a target and then browse to \\ad.mydomain.com\root\data only folders1 through 10 are there.

How do I get ALL folders to show up under data at the same time?
 
Seriously? No one?

After doing my own research it looks like I am going to have to make targets for EACH folder inside the \data\ folderspace.

Although I'm not really wanting to do it this way because the share locations might change. For instance, although folder02 might be on fileserver1 NOW, 6 months from now it might be moved to fileserver3.

Ideally, if DFS were looking 1 level higher it wouldn't care that the folder location had changed, because it would figure out that folder02 was now residing in the fileserver4 share so it would redirect there from then on.

Am I right?
 
See, after reading more and more about DFS it looks to me like it wants all the targets to have the same folder information.

So lets say you have folder1 and folder2 in target1. And folder3 and folder4 in target2. If you add both targets, when you navigate to the folder you are only going to see either folder1 & 2, or folder 3 & 4, not all of them.

The result I am looking for is the ability to see ALL 4 of the folders. Essentially combining targets together to form one large folder space.

Has anyone implemented this kind of setup?
 
cyr0n_k0r said:
Seriously? No one?

After doing my own research it looks like I am going to have to make targets for EACH folder inside the \data\ folderspace.

Am I right?
Click to expand...

Yes.

For example to make the following appear in one DFS level:

\\server1\share\folder1
\\server1\share\folder2
\\server2\share\folder3

\\dfs\sharename\

You would have to explicitly define each individual folder as a target in the DFS:

\dfs\sharename\folder1 - target is \\server1\share\folder1
\dfs\sharename\folder2 - target is \\server1\share\folder2
\dfs\sharename\folder3 - target is \\server2\share\folder3
 
What do I need to do then when a share moves? Lets say from server1 to server2. Do I need to change the target in DFS everytime?
 
cyr0n_k0r said:
What do I need to do then when a share moves? Lets say from server1 to server2. Do I need to change the target in DFS everytime?
Click to expand...

Are you building this in a clustered environment? If so just point all the targets to the clustername rather than the node name. Then it wouldn't matter which server it was on.

We essentially had a 4 node cluster setup.

NTFS1
NTFS2
NTFS3
NTFS4

Cluster name - NTFS

All targets in DFS pointed to

\\NTFS\SHARE1
\\NTFS\SHARE2

And so on. If you needed to fail the disks over to another server, you simply moved the cluster resource to the new node. A little more complex especially if you've never done a cluster setup but not that hard. We also used Veritas Storage Foundation to be able to dynamically expand our disks should we need to increase the size.
 
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