Hi,
In our organization we have DFS in place. We don't use DFS-r replication. The DFS roots are hosted on 3 2012R2 domain controllers and we have 2 domain based namespaces (windows 2000 mode). We have a lot of issues when users/applications/servers are trying to open folders with lots of files in them (typically 10000+). When this happens DFS hangs organization wide. This causes a lot of problems for back-end applications which are constantly moving around files to different front-end systems. Most of them get exceptions resulting in a manual restart. Since our organization is running 24/24, 7/7, this is very ennoying. Especially for engineers who have to get up at night to restart those services.
All user folders/mapped network disks are using DFS to access the file server. We have more then 2000 employees accessing a DFS namespace. At the time the issue occurs, they also experience problems accessing their data.
When the issues occur, we have no problems accessing the targets themselves, so we can exclude file server issues. We use a third party appliance as DNS server, but this also works as should at the time the issue occurs. The only way to resolve our issue that we have found so far is to clean out those folders, or when that's not possible, exlude them from the DFS namespace.
We thought upgrading our DC's from 2003 to 2012R2 would resolve the issue but that didn't do it. Is this a known issue and is there another workaround/fix? Also, is there a way to find out which target caused DFS to hang? We have already done a lot of troubleshooting with articles we found on the net but nothing seems to be wrong with our DFS setup/AD/DNS. We also opened serveral cases with MSFT but after the network trace analysis they always conclude there's nothing wrong.
Thanks in advance!