Best Practices for DFS when company has offices/users is different countries

Question

Hi All,

I work in a company that has 3 offices in 3 different countries in EU e.g. UK, Germany and Spain and 1 datacenter (not in the office) in UK. We use DFS namespace to share data. Each office has its own file server, that is also the DFS name server that only stare data for its own office. We also have a file server in datacenter in UK that is also a DFS name server that share common data for all 3 offices.

I recently migrated this common data from existing server to a new server and also migrated DFS configurations. I am now looking for best practices to improve our user experience from all 3 offices.

Previously we used only one namespace server (actual server where the data was hosted). We still have 1 server that hosts data but I have also added 3 more namespace servers in that same namespace. These are file servers 1 from each office as mentioned above. Now the situation is, we have one server in datacenter in UK that has all the data, this server and 3 other file servers, one from each office is added as a namespace server. I did this assuming, users from each office will connect to their local name server for namespace because we have AD sites configured and users belong to their local AD site. Questions are;

Am I right in my thinking?
Do I need additional settings to make this happen
If not, how can I improve user experience i.e. reduce latency and improve performance from all offices

Thread source link: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/225cbe27-2c3c-48ba-ad9e-7539556ac531/best-practices-for-dfs-when-company-has-officesusers-is-different-countries?forum=winserverfiles

Answer 1

Hi,

If you are using domain namespaces, clients will get their referrals from the nearest namespace server and the AD site configuration is used to determine that.
In that case, you should consider having one namespace server per site.

To further improve on that, you could have at least one domain controller per site and enable DFS-N “root scalability”. This will make the namespace server work with the nearest DC. You could also follow the guide to check for the dfs namespace server configuration.

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/josebda/2009/06/26/how-many-dfs-n-namespace-servers-do-you-need/

Best Regards,