Folder Redirection and DFS

[Eric]

Has anyone done any folder redirection using DFS to hold the redirected folders?

If so, what has your experience been? Has it worked well? Are you also using offline files as well? How well does the failover work? If your workstation loses connectivity to a node, does it go into an offline state, or seemlessly failover to another node in the DFS?

Thanks for any information!!

Eric

[graycat]

I can only speak from a 2000 domain point of view but I'd say it was a bad idea in a 2000 domain. If you've got a 2003 domain going then it may be worth looking at as the DFS replication is much improved.

Other than that, I can't really help.

[DennisT]

We use DFS replicated folders for redirects, profiles, and home folders. We are using R2 DFS which uses DFSr replication instead of FRS. It works well but there are some caveats.

If a DFS member server goes down it can take up to 10 minutes before the clients understand this. During this period they can experience extreme slowing in Windows Explorer or any other app that browses. This is the same as if they were trying to access a single server share.
If you're doing any AD migrations using the ADMT v3 tool it will not translate roaming profiles if they're on a DFSr share, IE yourdomain\User\Profiles. The work around is to change the profile to a direct share name (IE dfsserver\Profiles$), do the migration, then change it back.
DFS doesn't work like a cluster. When a user opens a file it is opened on the DFS member server that provides it first. If that server dies then the user wont be able to save their changes without redirecting that save (save as).