By Matthew Mattoon on Friday, September 26, 2008

Cheng has a post on using Distributed File System with System Center Virtual Machine Manager found here.  I have been running SCVMM with DFS-exposed libraries since Beta 2 of SCVMM 2007.  He has taken all of the guess work out of how to do it and has essentially documented everything I had to figure out.  If you have a virtualization infrastructure in multiple sites then you should definitely take a look at this article.

By Matthew Mattoon on Friday, September 19, 2008

One of the biggest benefit to Hyper-V over VMWare is Virtualization Rights. Basically Microsoft has provided you with a discount in the form of the ability to run Windows Server 2008 in Virtual Machines for free (this is based on which edition you are running - read on for more details).

This is a big win especially for a branch office scenario. When deploying branch offices normally you are constrained for space yet have requirements that would normally require multiple machines. The most common is the need to have a local DC (in order to define a replication strategy that makes sense - especially when using DFS). In most cases if a second machine did not make sense then most companies would not bother with virtualization because of...

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By Matthew Mattoon on Monday, September 15, 2008

In a previous post I described the benefits of DFS Namespaces, today we will be discussing DFS Replication.

Below I have outlined some of the features of DFS Replication.

Multimaster Replication Engine. DFS Replication can be used with standalone and domain-based namespaces as well as individual folders. Differential Replication. Cross-file RDC. Available with Enterprise and Datacenter only. These features will make many deployment scenarios more efficient. You can use DFS to perform data collection for a consolidated backup strategy, for data distribution as a method of publication of common data...

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By Matthew Mattoon on Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Just about every organization has the same approach to file services. This approach almost always includes a single point of failure or in larger organizations multiple single points of failure. These single points of failure are the file servers themselves. For the most part file services are completely overlooked when it comes to upgrades and restructuring, outside of a basic storage upgrade.This is part 1 in a 2 part series.

Part I - DFS Namespaces Part II - DFS Replication Distributed File System is a Microsoft Windows Server Role, now while DFS has been around for some time this article pertains to DFS in Windows Server 2003 R2 and Windows Server 2008. DFS is actually two separate components:

DFS Namespaces ...

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