About six to eight months ago we instituted a DFS plan for my location. I have no control of the configuration of DFS since the central office IT configures and monitors our servers, but we are using disk quota's on our DFS disks. The DFS is being used to store user directories, user desktops, and soon user favorites. We hope to store the entire user profile once we are all on Win7 and we are currently enforcing folder size disk quotas so users don't go over there storage allowance.
Our WAN team contacted us because during the day the traffic between the two servers is averaging 12 to 17 MBs. Though not causing any major bandwidth issues it is causing our costs for our circuit between the two buildings to go up.
DFS-R was configured like so
Installed on two file servers in our location they are in two seperate subnets and located in two seperate buildings.
The DFS structure was defined like so across both servers
4 shares UsersL1, UsersL2, UsersL3, and UsersL4
these DFS shares are sperated on to 4 drive partitions plus a staging drive. Defined as T, U, V, W, and X drive is the staging drive. The size and share structure is duplicated across both servers.
T drive UsersL1 partition size 254 GB with 83 GB in use Staging Quota 20GB, 496 users disk quota 500 MB
U drive UsersL2 partition size 45 GB with 30 GB in use Staging Quota 4 GB, 52 users disk quota 750 MB
V drive UsersL3 partition size 129 GB with 27 GB in use Staging Quota 8 GB, 58 users disk quota 2 GB
W drive UsersL4 partition size 74 GB with 34 GB in use Staging Quota 8 GB, 6 users no quota unlimited
X drive DFS Root storage size 80 GB with 30 GB in use
I had found threads where the storage team from Microsoft prefers the staging drive on a seperate spindle. which is not an option, since our servers are raid configured and central office did it this way. It also states that the staging sizes and quota
should be as large as possible, but the person who is configuring this does not agree and simply wants us to turn off quotas. Which is not an option locally, because our users tend to ignore requests for work data only.
We know for a fact the bandwidth issue is only DFS traffic.
We know for a fact that if we turn off disk quotas the traffic drops dramatically.
Why would disk quotas on the disk level be affecting band width I have one or two users that are at there disk quota storage limit but its not enough to warrant such bandwidth issues.
For some reason DFS reports the following error every couple of days at 4 AM on different drives, though at no point are any of the drives out of disk space.
The DFS Replication service encountered errors replicating one or more files because adequate free space was not available on volume T:. This volume contains the replicated folder, the staging folder, or both. Please make sure that enough free space is available
on this volume for replication to proceed. The service will retry replication periodically. Additional Information: Staging Folder: X:\UsersL1DfsrPrivateStaging\ContentSet{94DFBE4F-F7E4-47E3-B924-9DA0B2E4ECAE}-{3C8F55D1-C0C6-4C4A-B88D-D4A917D93934} Replicated
Folder Root: T:\usersL1 Replicated Folder Name: UsersL1 Replicated Folder ID: 94DFBE4F-F7E4-47E3-B924-9DA0B2E4ECAE Replication Group Name: ccccc.jjjjjjjjj.sssss.nn.uu\mmmmmmmmm\usersl1 Replication Group ID: 95DA0522-B032-48A5-9553-BFFC16D493A7 Member ID: 3C8F55D1-C0C6-4C4A-B88D-D4A917D93934
Volume: 82F47F73-C1E3-476C-A7EA-A56352EAB7E8
The analyst in charge at the central office blames our issue on Disk level quotas and says turn it off and our local IT Manager wants in on. I look up DFS-R configs and it seems we are not configured correctly for the size and level of usage we are using. And at no time have I found any indication that Disk Quotas can't be used or causes problems
Any suggestions or help will be greatly appreciated.