Guys.

Got a weird issue. I have two Server 2012 R2 servers running DFS. I have been using the get-dfsrbacklog command for months with out issue. After i restarted SERVER-B i am unable to retrieve the DFS backlog from either SERVER-B or SERVER-A. I receive the message below. 

I am unsure what the issue is and google is not turning up much. Can anyone advise?

Get-DfsrBacklog : Could not retrieve the backlog information. Replication group: "EUHome" Replicated folder: "EUHome"

Good Afternoon,

I have file servers that are running Windows Server 2012 R2 x64 and Windows Server 2008 R2 x64. I am trying to setup a XCACLS.VBS script so that i can keep a structured directory on one of my file servers. The point of this is so users can't create folders/files in the top 2 folder directories and then the directories after that, they can create what they want.

I have given it a shared network drive letter of being the G drive. 

Below is an example of the setup i currently have in place:

G:\DB15

G:\DB15\1234

G:\DB15\1234\Data

In the following directory, i would like to have the following permission setup with: G:\DB15\1234

Domain Admins=Full

Project_Setup=Full

Domain Users= Read & Execute, List folder contents, and Read

In the Data folder, i would like to have the following permissions set:

Domain Admins=Full

Domain Users=Modify

Is there a way i can set this up using XCACLS or any other software? Seems like the challenge is that the first 2 folders are set for Domain Users to have Read and Execute, List, and Read and then the subfolders after that have Domain Users as Modify.

Thank you for your help!

Hi Everybody,

We have a few file servers full of folders and permissions. 

I need to grab some users and replace them with new ones. The SID would be totally new and SID history can not help. Actually it would be a new user in a new Domain which has not been migrated by tools.

Is there any tool or application who can search the file server for the user and replace it with other user? or any script?

**************** Sincerely Yours Ziyaei Ali *****************

I have three identical Windows Server 2012 R2 file servers in my environment:

Server1 - Existing production file server with ~4 TB of data in a folder called E:\Data

Server2 - Downstream file server not deployed yet

Server3 - Downstream file server not deployed yet

Following the steps in this Microsoft blog post, I used DFS Database cloning to create a single replication group that replicates the E:\Data folder across all three servers in a mesh continuously (not on a schedule). 

My situation is currently this: though the DFS Management tool shows no issues, replication is not happening. Files are not replicating at all. I've created a single unique test folder on all three servers, expecting the folder to appear on the other two servers, and they do not.

I've monitored the DFS Event Log carefully for days, and the only unexpected or unusual event that appears is a steady stream of 4412 events (The DFS Replication service detected that a file was changed on multiple servers. A conflict resolution algorithm was used to determine the winning file. The losing file was moved to the Conflict and Deleted folder) on BOTH downstream folders, but not on the upstream folder. 

Both downstream servers are not deployed, so data is not changing on them at all, aside from the DFS replication, which is not happening at all.

What is happening here? Why is my folder not replicating? How can I go about finding the problem? And and all help is very much appreciated.

Dear Experts,

WE installed Plotter on File Server..

All Client machines when they access this plotter on File Server, it is always ask for "Administrator and Password" to installed this.

How can we install it on clients machines without Admin?

VeasnaYim

We have two new resources for designing software-defined storage using Windows Server 2012 R2 and its technologies such as Storage Spaces and Scale-Out File Server:

• Software-Defined Storage Design Considerations Guide
• Software-Defined Storage Design Calculator

These resources take into consideration our current recommended best practices, and we hope that you find them useful!

Thanks,

Jason Gerend - Senior Content Developer

Joshua Adams - Senior Program Manager

We're preparing to move our standalone DFS root to a new server and then decommission the old server.  I'm trying to determine whether it would be better to use the DFSutil or FSMT.  I'm not very familiar with either, I know dfsutil is a command line tool and it looks "fairly" simple to use and FSMT is a GUI based wizard that does the "magic" in the background.  Will dfsutil allow me to migrate all of the data along with the entire namespace and retain permissions?  Considering I'm not familiar with either, would it be better for me to use FSMT and stick to filling in the blanks with the Wizard?  Any input would be much appreciated!

Hello,
I have a question for migrating file servers that are part of the same DFS replication group.

So, we have file servers that sync their data to one clustered file server which is a replication partner to ALL file servers. We have over 100 file servers. They basically use one clustered file server to store copies of all file server shares as a backup using DFS. But they need to keep the copies in sync. So, once I move the file server to another forest, replication breaks. It is not supported cross forest by DFS. Would you recommend building a new server in the target and switch replication partners after migration? We have a big concern that it will take a very long time to replicate and the data will be out of sync. The data is very critical on the DFS shares, so we can’t afford to be out of sync for a long time. We can't migrate all file servers at once. It is not possible.

Please let me know what other options we have and what outages should we plan for?

Thank you in advance!

So, we have file servers that sync their data to one clustered file server which is a replication partner to ALL file servers. We have over 100 file servers. They basically use one clustered file server to store copies of all file server shares as a backup using DFS. But they need to keep the copies in sync. So, once I move the file server to another forest, replication breaks. It is not supported cross forest by DFS. Would you recommend building a new server in the target and switch replication partners after migration? We have a big concern that it will take a very long time to replicate and the data will be out of sync. The data is very critical on the DFS shares, so we can’t afford to be out of sync for a long time.  We can't migrate all file servers at once.

Please recommend other options for migrating file servers that are members of the same replication group.

Thank you very much!

Hello,

I have two servers 2012 R2 :

- Server1 is an AD with DFS namespace & replication.

- Server2 is regular server in the domain (not a secondary domain controller) with DFS namespace/replication.

So my domain name is : example.priv, and my share : \\example.priv\SharedFolder .

Some shared folders are sync between both server.

I added Server2 in the namespace servers.

My goal is to have high avalaibility if my Server1 goes down, i still want to access to the share.

if i ping example.priv it returns Server1's IP.

When i stop the Server1, i cant have access to my share anymore, because example.priv resolves only to Server1.

I need example.priv to resolve to Server1 and Server2 (round robin?) 

How could i setup my environment to have access to my share when Server1 is down? 

Thank you,

I have a client who currently only has one AD site, will be expanding to three sites by early next year and will have a fourth site a year after that. Their current single site is made of two physical sites connected with a 1 Gbps fiber strand running between the two buildings. The main building generally has about 150 users, the smaller building currently has 15 users though that number is likely to increase over the next few months. the smaller building currently does not have any local server though I believe it likely there will be a domain/file/print/wsus server implemented there before the end of the year. the three new sites are each going to start with only 2-3 users but will need to be able to scale to 8-10 each in the near future.

the organization's users will be close to 100% mobile between the sites, with 70%+ of the users using both a laptop and a workstation. A small number will also use an RDSSH server. There is the requirement to prevent loss of data through the laptops and make sure that their profile data is accessible on any of the machines. Connectivity between the new sites and the current site (main office) will likely be less than 10 Mbps, though will be three 9s reliability.

Something in the solution is definitely going to involve folder redirection. Offline access to the files will not be permitted. Client VPN and limited use RDSH server will be used for remote work.

Some of the users will be less mobile than others and will spend the majority of their time in one office, but there will certainly be some movement between all of the sites for all of the users at least occasionally.

Majority of the workstations are windows 7 pro with a few windows 8.1 pro machines.

All domain controllers and file servers are 2012 R2 with software assurance. It is probable that the domain controllers will get upgraded to server 2016 when it releases and at least some of the branch offices will also get server 2016.

I am trying to come up with a solution for access to redirected folders and it has me quite stumped.

I really want the answer to be to redirect folders to a dfs namespace and use replication to replicate it to the other file servers but I think from what I am finding that for redirected folders, this is not supported. Most of the entries I have found for this were generally for redirected folders with roaming profiles and I won't be using roaming profiles, but for the reasons for roaming profiles have problems, it would seem to make sense redirected folders would also. Does anyone have any conflicting thoughts on whether or not dfsr may be viable here and why?

At the moment, the best thing I am coming up with is redirecting everything to a file server in the main office and putting in a WAN accelerator on each end of the WAN connections to help improve performance, but this is not all that attractive for obvious reasons. I also considered using a hosted branch cache server, but I don't think this would help file redirection go back up the WAN connection, though would certainly be more cost effective than buying 4 WAN accelerators.

My other thought is just to use a Remote desktop session host located in the main office as the primary machine at the branch offices, but I am not 100% sure the users who frequently travel between the sites are going to be able to use that solution successfully.

Does anyone have any ideas/suggestions/comments?

I am looking to determine whether or not windows server 2012R2 storage spaces natively supports Mirroring of either one storage space to another or one disk created on Storage Space A to another disk created on Storage Space B.  The situation is we have a client using Datacore who has two P2000 SAN's.  The Datacore boxes are set up in a cluster like configuration and handle the storage layer all the virtual machine live on. Datacore is configured to mirror one SAN to the other and should allow for resources to function normally in the event one SAN dies.  They would like to move away from Datacore and use native windows server capabilities. The ideal scenario I am trying to achieve is converting the two Datacore boxes into scale out file servers, converting the SAN's to SAS JBOD's (Not sure if this is possible but lets assume it is), Creating two storage pools with one disk each (One storage pool then disk on top of storage pool per SAN, segregating disks per SAN) then serving the storage to the hyper-v servers and VMM through a continuously available SMB3 share.  I have done this in a lab network but i can't seem to figure out how to, or if its even possible to, provide the client with the same level of redundancy they are achieving now.  In order to do this I would need to then mirror one disk or storage pool (Or SAN) to the other disk or storage pool to protect against a single SAN failure. Is this achievable with storage spaces, and if it is in the event of a SAN (OR POOL/DISK) failure will the failover to the replication SAN (Or POOL/DISK) be automatic or manual.  Lastly if this is not achievable through storage spaces can it be coupled with another native feature like Hyper-V replica, or Storage replica (though it seems this is only available in server 2016).  Any guidance or recommendations would be great, I will continue digging to determine if i can convert the P2000's to SAS connected JBOD's. I would be happy to provide any follow up information as this is a rather complex scenario. Have a lot of clients using storage spaces with Scale out files servers but i haven't yet attempted to provide a client with JBOD redundancy. 

If my above ideal scenario is completely off the basic question is how can I provide the client uninterrupted service in the event that a JBOD/SAN goes down with native windows server 2012R2 features.

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 :-)

Instructions at the two links below describe how to mirror an existing boot disk for Win2003 and Win2008 respectively:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc783353%28v=ws.10%29.aspx

http://www.techotopia.com/index.php/Mirroring_Windows_Server_2008_R2_GBT_and_MBR_Boot_and_System_Disks

Both sets of instructions are substantially the same and both involve an xcopy step copy create a copy of the EFI files. However, numerous people (and now me) have reported that Windows reports a sharing violation when attempting to do this, on the EFI\Microsoft\Boot\BCD file. The entire operation is invalidated because of this sharing violation.

How to overcome it please?

Hello,

we have enabled deduplication for a Windows 2012 volume.

We see a slow data read Performance when we copy data from  the dedup volume to another volume or Server.

For example:

Deduplicated Volume is LUN on a iSCSI target, 10 GBit Connection.
"Copy Speed" for Files about 120 MB/s

Non-Deduplicated Volume on the same iSCSI Target:
"Copy Speed" for files about 350-400 MB/s

Is this normal behaviour?

Regards

When I'm copying VHD files between 2 different servers with data dedupe enabled I see where slow copy speeds. Normally a 40 GB VHD file would take app. 10 minutes copy, but when copying between these 2 servers and the volumes with data dedupe enabled it can take 2-3 hours. Both servers are fully patched Server 2012R2 running on VMware - no data dedupe enabled on SAN.

Copying between the same 2 servers from 2 other volumes without data dedupe, the copy speeds are normal

Is this normal behavior? I could understand if there might have been a slight difference, but not this much. Any thoughts? Thanks!

Hello,

We're using DFS replication for backing up a file share from branch office server to datacenter. 

We have a DFS replication group set with two members - server on our branch office (Branch-Srv1) and a server in our datacenter (Hub-Srv1). Both servers are running Windows Server 2008 R2.

Source path on Branch-Srv1 is D:\Fileshare 

Target path on Hub-Srv1 is E:\Backup\Branch-Srv1

Everything has worked smoothly until now when E drive is running out of disk space on the hub server. Our server administrator has kindly created a new (2 TeraBytes) volume on Hub-Srv1 and assigned it a drive letter F.

So I must re-configure DFS replication to drive F on Hub-Srv1.

Total amount of data on replicated folder is about 200GB. Bandwidth between hub and branch is ~ 1Mbit/s so it would take eons to finish replication if it's started from scratch. I've read Ned's blog about preseeding a replicated contents, but I don't see any of those scenarios fit mine http://blogs.technet.com/b/askds/archive/2010/09/07/replacing-dfsr-member-hardware-or-os-part-2-pre-seeding.aspx

Could someone advise what is the correct method to change target drive letter + path on hub server while minimizing time for replication (preseeding) ?

Hello,

I've looked all over but I'm not finding answers to my question anywhere. Is it possible to follow the directions found here from Server 2008 R2 to Server 2012 R2? From what I can find, I see that this works on Server 2012 -> Server 2012, but I'm working on migrating off Server 2008 R2 initially. If this is possible, what needs to be done to update powershell to V4.0 as well as getting the new DFSR Cmdlets.

Thanks

I have a cranky Server 2012 server that needs upgrading, but it is a virtual machine and the file share volume is separate from the OS volume. I can detach the file share volume from the old VM and attach it to a new VM so I can avoid hand-copying all of those files between VMs. What complicates things is I'm using file deduplication on this volume.

I performed a test where I built a VM with 2012 that had a second deduplicated volume with shadow copies enabled, ran the dedupe processes manually to make sure there was some deduplication (11%), took some snapshots, then I detached the volume from the test 2012 server and attached it to the test 2012R2 server. The deduplication and snapshots were preserved, and the test files I copied (a mix of PDFs, Office docs, Visio drawings, and plain text) opened successfully without any apparent problem. Both VMs were domain members, and the domain file system ACLs were also preserved. I had to create new shares, but that was easy.

Aside from making sure file deduplication and updates are installed on the new VM first, are there any caveats to migrating a deduplicated volume from 2012 to 2012R2 in this manner?

I'd also like to migrate a file share volume from 2003 to 2012R2 the same way, and then enable deduplication on the migrated volume, but that can happen later.

--