Re: Distributed File System

[Phil Dye <phil@xxxxxxx>]

On 11/10/05, Martyn Wendon <mailing.lists@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> Is anybody here using Microsoft's Distributed File System?

Yes, I use it across a couple of servers here at work. Not exactly
large scale, but probably not a million miles away from what you want
either.

> Obviously this is easy enough to do by simple shares (machine1\videos,
> machine2\videos, etc) but managing and locating files is then a bit of
a
> chore, especially with clients like XBMC.

Does XBMC support DFS? You need specific client support to do it (it
relies on Active Directory et al); Win2K upwards is OK, and there's a
W98 client, but I've no idea about other platforms I'm afraid.

> What would be great I thought would be a way to simply refer to the
"storage
> space" as "my_huge_space\videos" (for example), with
content being
> seamlessly available from whatever machine it is located on.

It's not quite that seamless...  You still need to assign given
content to given shares; all that DFS does is create a more
transparent namespace, allowing you to move/replicate shares between
servers, without the clients needing to know. For example, I use
something like;

\\alchemydigital.com\DFS  - the DFS 'root' (ie ADdomain\DFS)
\\alchemydigital.com\DFS\share1  - eg for one logical group of data
(mapped to a drive letter on clients)
\\alchemydigital.com\DFS\share2  - eg for another logical group of
data (mapped to another drive letter on clients)

Note that share1 is /actually/ (and also addressable as)
\\server1\share1 and share2 is \\server2\share2. You can't combine the
space on server1 and server2 into one homogenous share, which is what
I think you want to do.

> After doing a bit of research, it seems that Microsoft's DFS offers
exactly
> this, with extra bells and whistles such as caching, replication and
> fail-over.

Sort of, yes... the replication is standard NTFRS underneath (with all
the gotchas that comes with), and fail-over is only of use if you've
replicated content (DFS then redirects clients to either/a server
depending on availability; but not load-balanced).

> So if anybody is using this, or has used it previously, can you give
any
> thoughts / comments on performance and reliability?

HTH,

--
phil