HI There,

We have 10 file servers in our environment with DFS-R enabled. As of now DFS replication data is placed in D drive.

We are moving replication data from D drive to E drive due to lack of space in D drive on few servers. Below is approach we followed in order to avoid replication of the entire data from the central DFS-R server;

1. Stop DFS-R service on target server

2. Copy the data from D drive to E drive

3. Adjust target replication folders to E drive in DFS management

4. Enable the DFS-R service

However after the changing the drive, I see that DFS-R starts replicating entire data in the replication folder irrespective of that data already exists. 

Is there a way to avoid this?

Mahi

Hi All.

In the past months, on several occasions, network shares on a file server Windows Server 2012 Datacenter  became highly unresponsive it takes up to 20-25 seconds just to open  a DFS share. Restart solves the issue. It happened twice last week.

The server is virtual machine (VMWare tools ver. 9.4.11.2400950), member of Domain (2003 scheme).

Please let me know if I may provide more useful information.

Regards,

DH

Hello, Dear,

Since 1 week, my Files Services Access is not possible and it seems that the Policy is stopping on the Windows 2008 Server. I had a look on the Dell Server Administrator but there are not "Hardware problem".

A different times, no users can access the File Services. When going on the server I see some Events regarding "Group Policy Failed", after rebooting the server manually directly from the server, everything is ok and all the users can go back to work on the different "Shared Folders". 

1) I noticed on the "Administratives Events" that theGROUP POLICY FAILED:

    "The processing of Group Policy failed. Windows attempted to read the file \\truberries.local\sysvol\truberries.local\Policies\{31B2F340-016D-11D2-945F-00C04FB984F9}\gpt.ini from a domain controller and was not successful. Group Policy settings may not be applied until this event is resolved. This issue may be transient and could be caused by one or more of the following:
    a) Name Resolution/Network Connectivity to the current domain controller.
    b) File Replication Service Latency (a file created on another domain controller has not replicated to the current domain controller).
    c) The Distributed File System (DFS) client has been disabled."

2) After the Group Policy Failed, “Administrative Events” shows also that "Data Corruption may occur":

• “The driver detected that the device \Device\Harddisk0\DR0 has its write cache enabled. Data corruption may occur.”
• “Volume Shadow Copy Service error: Unexpected error calling routine RegOpenKeyExW(-2147483646,SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\VSS\Diag,...).  hr = 0x80070005, Access is denied.

.

Operation:

   Initializing Writer

Context:

   Writer Class Id: {e8132975-6f93-4464-a53e-1050253ae220}

   Writer Name: System Writer

   Writer Instance ID: {d272cca4-3c59-4411-8d5c-1b36555903b8}”

• “Active Directory Domain Services could not disable the software-based disk write cache on the following hard disk.

Hard disk:

c:

Data might be lost during system failures.”

The RAID Controller is a Software based controller, there is 2 Disk in Raid 1.

please let me know if you have heard about this issue, thank you.

:-)

Georgios

Hi!

I have a weird problem, our DFSR have stopped working on one of our servers. We have seven remote2008 R2 file servers that is synchronizing to one Server 2012 R2 server à la Hub and Spoke.

I ran Get-DFSRState and saw that many files had the updatestate Blocked. So I ran this command:

Get-DfsrState | ? SourceComputerName -Match TheServerThatIsFailing01 | Group-Object updatestate

Count Name                      Group
----- ----                      -----
  144 Waiting                   {Microsoft.DistributedFileSystemReplication.DfsrUpdate, Microsoft.DistributedFileSystemReplication.DfsrUpdate, Microsoft.Distribute...
  267 Scheduled                 {Microsoft.DistributedFileSystemReplication.DfsrUpdate, Microsoft.DistributedFileSystemReplication.DfsrUpdate, Microsoft.Distribute...
  345 Blocked                   {Microsoft.DistributedFileSystemReplication.DfsrUpdate, Microsoft.DistributedFileSystemReplication.DfsrUpdate, Microsoft.Distribute...

I have no idea how to troubleshoot, there's free disk space available, no errors in event viewer.

Does any one know what blocked means? How do i troubleshoot ?

Thanks!

According to the MS blog Deploying Data Deduplication for VDI storage in Windows Server 2012 R2, a separate file server must be used to deduplicate VDI virtual hard drives.  Here is the relevant quote:

"First and foremost, to deploy Data Deduplication with VDI, the storage and compute responsibilities must be provided by separate machines."

Then there are these two quotes from the MS blog Extending Data Deduplication to new workloads in Windows Server 2012 R2:

"We also realized that all of this would take up resources on the server running Data Deduplication. If we were to run this on the same server as the VMs, then we’d be competing with them for resources. Especially memory. So we quickly came to the conclusion that we needed to separate out storage and computation nodes when Data Deduplication was involved with virtualization."

"we do not support deduplication of arbitrary in use VHDs in Windows Server 2012 R2. However, since Data Deduplication is a core part of the storage stack, there is no explicit block in place that prevents it from being enabled on arbitrary workloads."

I'm trying to determine what's a best practice vs what's enforced by the OS.  Based on the last paragraph quoted above and the fact that there is no restriction to prevent a Hyper-V server from being a file server as well, I suspect it would be possible to have the RDS-VH VDI (Hyper-V) host deduplicate its own guest virtual hard drives so long as they were in a shared folder on a non-system drive (in spite of the fact that said folder is technically local).  Operating under the assumption that the server in question has plenty of processing power and memory to spare, is there anything in the OS to prevent such a configuration?

Due to severe data corruption, we lost some Windows servers. We are working to rebuild and restore, but have some questions about the process.

We are (were?) running Windows Server 2008 R2, using DFS-R to replicate data to and from another location. Fortunately the data still exists, but now we need to rebuild the destroyed member server. I am concerned that simply rebuilding the server with the same identity and adding it back to the replication group will result in the loss of data on the other member server. Another fear is that restoration of data from tape will result in any newly created/updated data being overwritten by the older data from tape.

Can anyone outline the complete steps needed to rebuild a DFS-R member server, and bring it back with minimal downtime and zero data loss? In all my searching, I have not found any documentation on this process. I've been in IT a long time, but have minimal experience with Windows servers; we just migrated from Novell a couple years ago.

Thanks in advance,

I have recently upgraded a clients servers to Windows Server 2012 & since doing so have lost the ability to scan to folder.

Both servers are domain controllers and previously on a 2008 domain controller I would have had to make the following change to allow scan to folder:
 Administrative Tools
 Server Manager
 Features
 Group Policy Manager
 Forest: ...
 Default Domain Policy
Computer configuration
 Policies
 Windows Settings
 Security Settings
 Local Policies
 Security Options
 Microsoft Network Server: Digitally Sign Communications (Always)
 - Define This Policy
 - Disabled

However I have applied this to the Windows 2012 server but am still unable to scan, possibly due to added layers of security in server 2012. The error on the scanner is Authentication with the destination has failed check settings.
I have also tried the following at the server:
Policies -> Security Policies
Change Network Security: LAN Manager authentication level to: Send LM & NTLM - Use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated.
Network security: Minimum session security for NTLM SSP based (including secure RPC) clients and uncheck the require 128 bit.
Network security: Minimum session security for NTLM SSP based (including secure RPC) servers and uncheck the require 128 bit
I have created a user account on the server for the ricoh and set this in the settiings of the Ricoh and verified everything is correct.

Are there any other things I have missed?

1. We have observed that there is difference in the free space in A server , B server and C forj:\Data
2. The oldest file available inA server is 23/1/2015 in replication folder but for the same interface in C server for 12/10/2013.

How is it possible? Replication are OK. All 3 servers server added into replication partner each other.

Recent replication folders and files are replication each other without any issues.

Please help !!!

Hi guys 

My greatest nightmare happened yesterday. I lost on SSD  in my clustered, tiered, enclosure aware storage pool and all virtual disks got unresponsive before RHS rebooted my two head nodes. This is primary storage for a Hyper-V cluster, so imagine the number of angry phone calls...

Key info:

• Failover cluster
• Two head nodes
• Three Quanta SAS JBODs
• 56 x Seagate ST1000NM0023
• 8 x Sandisk SDLKAE6M200G5CA1 (Optimus Ascend)
• One storage pool
• 4 virtual disks (storage quorum and 3 disk containing one SOFS share each

So what happened is one SSD started misbehaving and throwing controller errors (11, LSI_SAS2) and eventually warnings on failed IO operations (1531 disk). 

Then RHS threw a time out on my storage pool (1230 FailoverClustering) and followed up with timeouts on all virtual disks including my storage cluster disk witness.

Eventually one cluster node bugchecked 0x9E  (1001, Bugcheck 0x0000009e (0xffffe0011d522080, 0x00000000000004b0, 0x0000000000000005, 0x0000000000000000) which I believe is forced by RHS due to continoued timeouts. The remaining head node had lost access to the disk witness and decided it had lost quorum and shut the whole cluster down.

When the first head nod had rebooted it had full access to the storage pool and virtual disks including the storage cluster disk witness, so it started the cluster. The second head node booted and joined the cluster and everything is peachy. Well, except for angry users and owners of virtual machines stored on SOFS.

The storage pool reported a degraded state and one SSD was reported missing. I replaced the SSD and everything i healthy again now. But what the heck happened? I thought the storage pool would abstract the physical disk layer, and everything from virtual disk and up would be oblivious to physical failure.

Where do I even start looking at this one to prevent future meltdowns? I'll be happy to post logs and even my powershell setup script for the entire storage as well as details as needed. Any help is appreciated :-)

Hello All,

Recently we started receiving an error on accessing the Network Shares in our LAN, its giving a strange error "The specified path does not exist"/ "We can't find the <address>, please make sure you're using correct location or web address". I checked below article regarding this issue but didn't solve my problem.

http://www.megaleecher.net/Fix_Windows_Cannot_Access_Error

Strange thing is that we don't face this issue with all the shares on the same server but some of them, very random, no common thread. Another interesting observation is that I am able to open the Share as a Network Map Drive not directly from Hyper Link.

Your inputs are valuable on this

Thanks

Uwaiz

I am reviewing Microsoft's ODX documentation.  It states the following:

The Windows host also limits the number of file fragments to 64. If the offload read request consists of more than 64 fragments, Windows fails the copy offload request and falls back to the traditional copy operation.

I have two volumes (S: and T:) on an iSCSI SAN.  I have a test file 960MB.bin on my S:\ drive.  My disk editor shows that this file is comprised of 180 clusters:

I then copy the file from the S:\ volume to the T:\ volume.  During the copy operation, I monitor the traffic going to the iSCSI volumes.  I see 180 back-to-back ODX transfers comprised of the following sequence:

• Source Volume:  CDB - Populate Token
• Source Volume:  CDB - Receive ROD Token Information
• Destination Volume:  CDB - Write Using Token
• This repeats a total of 180 times until the file copy is complete

So when Microsoft's documentation states that The Windows host also limits the number of file fragments to 64, what is it referring too?  If it's referring to the file fragmentation like I show above, why did ODX engage for me?  Is there a difference between Server 2012 and 2012 R2?  Is there a registry key to adjust this setting?

I have a two node Hyper-V cluster configured with Storage Spaces on Windows Server 2012 R2. I have 3 CSVs. The third CSV (CSV3) has SSDs and is configured for storage tiers. In my initial testing, I put one VM on that storage and ran the Storage Tiers Optimization Report. It ran fine and showed all data served from the SSD tier (which was expected, it was a small server).

I've since added several more servers to the SSD tier. I attempted to run the optimization report again so I could see the usage and it fails with the following error:

The operation requested is not supported by the hardware backing the volume. (0x8900002A).

Nothing has changed on the server. I haven't installed any updates or other software. Has anyone encountered this error? I can't find any information about it. The only thing I can think of is the server that owns the storage isn't activated (waiting on Finance to approve the quote...) Could that be the issue?

Hi all how are you today, Here is my Issue i'm attempting to setup DFS on our network and its not working quite how I expected it to. I have a Domain Controller at a branch office running Server 2012 that connects to our Domain Controller here at our main office running Server 2008, now the DC at our branch office also functions as the file server considering it has more than enough storage space on it. At the main office we have 1 DC and a file server running Server 2008 and I setup DFS on our file server and configured a namespace and replication group for the folder I want to replicate between the two servers  and then I get errors

4004

4102

5002

in that order on the branch office DC. Now if I set up a new share on our main office DC with the same name and same permissions as the folder i'm trying to replicate between the main office storage server and branch office DC and then throw a few text documents and files in there it works flawlessly, I even put a 50gb folder into it to see if it would continue working and it did. So I dont know what is wrong but what I find particularly interesting in the 5002 error is the "Error: 5 (Access is denied.)" line of text under additional information. Now I seen people all over technet with that same error and it has never been solved, well this time we have to solve it guys so any and all help would be appreciated.

Viper Technologies Computer Repair Putting The Venomus Bite Back In Your Computer We Are Located In Antigonish ,NS Canada Check Us Out HTTP://WWW.VIPERTECHNOLOGIES.TK

Hello everybody,

I am implementing a Scale-out file server together with Hyper-v, both clusters have been equipped with Chelsio nics which have been placed in different VLANs (to enable SMB multichannel). I ran some file copy between these systems in order to see how RDMA is working and I have observed some strange and inconsistent behaviours. I was expecting to see the same speed when moving files between systems that shares the same network infrastructure (all servers are connected to the same switches) and that mount the RDMA nics.

The network team implemented MLAG on the switches on which the RDMA nics are connected.

I just wondered if the implementation of MLAG could potentially interfere with the proper operation of the SMB 3.x ? 

The behaviours that I have observed can be summarized as:

File copy between the Hv hosts - I manage to achieve a speed of 1.5 GB/s, but during this process the speed fall down (almost to 0 MB/s) for two times. it seems that I have reach a bottleneck or some hard limit.

File copy between the FS cluster node - I managed to achieve a speed of 600 MB/s, but at 1/3 of the copy the speed is reduced to 135 MB/s without been able to recover to the 600 MB/s.

File copy between the Hv hosts and FS - I managed to achieve a speed of 600 MB/s.

Thank you for the help J

So I'm seeing some strange, slow behavior with a simple Storage Spaces pool with only a pair of mirrored drives.  I've seen lots of folks having problems with SS, but most are issues with parity spaces.

I've got a new Dell R730xd with 4 of their 400GB nvme ExpresFlash SSDs.  The machine also has a PERC card with a bunch of 15K rpm SAS drives and will be used for SQL Server. (and a pair of E5-2643v3 xeons and 256GB ram)

This is running Windows Server 2012R2 with all the latest patches.  I've used both Storage Spaces / pools and traditional windows disk management to create a mirrored pair of these drives.  I also tested a single drive by itself.  The SS volume actually showed huge promise for a moment where it was obviously reading simultaneously from both drives.  These are some of the fastest SSDs available now, so these results for just using a pair of them are pretty awesome.  Using the old-school windows disk mirroring does show a performance penalty vs. a bare drive, but it's not drastic, so it's probably what I'll be forced to use unless I can fix the problem.

*note I later rebuilt this pool using a 4k physical & logical sector size hoping that was the culprit, but it didn't help.  It sorta looks like I'm running into some PCIe bus contention, possibly overloading the backplane. *shrug*

You can see the PS syntax used to create this here:
photobucket image

And here's what a single drive looks like by itself:

Hi All.

In the past months, on several occasions, network shares on a file server Windows Server 2012 Datacenter  became highly unresponsive it takes up to 20-25 seconds just to open  a DFS share. Restart solves the issue. It happened twice last week.

The server is virtual machine (VMWare tools ver. 9.4.11.2400950), member of Domain (2003 scheme).

Please let me know if I may provide more useful information.

Regards,

DH

On a Windows 2003 server, I have a dedicated hidden share where I store all Users' Home Directory folders.

Normally I can remote browse to the share via UNC.

However some folder remain hidden unless I either browse directly from the file server itself. This will work when using the UNC path as well.

I did see that the icon does look different. The ones I cannot see remotely are in yellow but with a sheet of paper at the top.