Configuring DFS namespaces

Windowsnetworking.com - In my previous article, "Implementing DFS Namespaces," we saw how to create a namespace (a virtual folder tree) using the enhanced DFS Management console of Windows Server 2003 R2.

This article expands on the previous one by looking at how to configure namespaces in enterprise environments where there are multiple sites. Since a site, in Active Directory terminology, basically refers to a collection of computers that are connected together as a LAN, a multisite environment usually means multiple LANs, each located at a different geographical site.

For example, a company that has its headquarters in Vancouver, British Columbia, might have a secondary site or branch office located a few hours south in Seattle. Even though both locations may belong to the same domain, they may be separate sites to better manage replication traffic over a slow WAN link connecting them.

DFS Namespaces includes new features that makes DFS work more efficiently for scenarios like this than the older DFS component of Windows 2000 worked in such scenarios. We’ll look at several ways you can improve the operation of your namespace in an enterprise environment like this.

Adding Namespace servers

When deploying domain-based namespaces, you can add additional namespace servers to host a namespace. This has several advantages:

• If one server hosting the namespace goes down, the namespace will still be available to users who need to access shared resources on your network. Adding another namespace thus increases the availability of your namespace.
• If you have a namespace that must be available to users across your organization but your Active Directory network has more than one site, then each site should have a namespace server hosting your namespace. That way, when users in a site need to contact a namespace server for referrals, they can do so locally instead of sending traffic requests to other sites. This improves performance and reduces unnecessary WAN traffic.

Note that adding namespace servers is only supported for domain-based namespaces, not standalone namespaces.

Before showing how to add a namespace server, let’s quickly review the scenario from my previous article:

• Our domain is R2.local and our domain controller is BOX161.
• We created a domain-based namespace named Accounting.
• This namespace is hosted on server BOX162.
• The namespace contains targets on servers BOX162 and BOX163.
• All servers are located in Default-First-Site, which is company headquarters in Vancouver.
• All servers are running Windows Server 2003 R2.

To make our scenario more enterprise-level, we’ll now add the following:

• We’ll create a second site named Seattle-Site, which is a branch office located in Seattle.
• Seattle-Site is in the same domain R2.local.
• Domain controller BOX171 is located in Seattle.

Let’s now add BOX171 as a new namespace server for our Accounting namespace. Open the DFS Management console, select the \\r2.local\Accounting namespace in the console tree, and click the Namespace Servers tab in the Details pane (Figure 1):