Windows 2008 R2 and DFS

[Vader]

Hey all. I'm working on a pretty large project for work for a new document imaging system. One of the requirements from our custom application team is to setup 2 Application servers that will access images from the same storage area. We need to have a folder for Archive images and a Folder for new images. However, from what i'm told from the Application team it can't be a shared folder, something to do with corruption..etc.

We are looking at this in two ways:

1. Setup a Failover Cluster with DFS NameSpace and Replication in Standalone mode on the Application servers. This I can handle...seems pretty straight forward.

This is where i'm confused.

2. The second option that the application team is looking at is running 2 standalone 2008 R2 servers that have access to the same storage.

My question for number two is can you do this with two standalone servers or two servers in a Active/Active configuration?

 

[lizardking009]

You can set up DFS Replication to replicate folders that will be accessed locally, although DFS won't replicate open files. Its obviously not going to work right for shared databases. Another option is something like DoubleTake.

2 Servers that access the same storage implies a shared folder unless you spring for a 3rd party clustered file system, as NTFS is not clusterable. (You can use it with clustering, but only one server accesses the LUN at a time. Clustered Shared Volumes only allow one server to access for writes.)

Since its a custom application, why don't they fix their design so it works with a shared folder?