Source
r/sysadmin•
Handiddy83

Regional Office Home Drives in AD

What do you think the best option for the below situation would be to improve performance.

Main Datacenter hosts Home Drives. All offices have VPLS back to the datacenter.

A remote office has grown and now that pipe to the datacenter s saturated. Right now Home Drives Redirect and sync to the users desk. We have a Domain controller at the location.

Is it possible to have the Home Drives which currently are on a File Server in a datacenter replicate to the Domain Controller or a File Server at the site, which then syncs to the users desktop? Would speed things up when syncing files from the User PC. Then perhaps the File Server to File Server replication could be scheduled for non peak hours? Is that even possible?

Posted Nov 13, 2018, 4:56 PM UTC

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brkdncrWindows Admin•

Instead of redirection consider using offline file sync (old) or onedrive (modern). Files are local but get background sync'd to the datacenter.

Branchcache will probably be the easiest to implement.

DFS-R is eventually going to cause you pain. It works well until it doesn't.

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j4sanderJack of All Trades•

If you have Windows Enterprise on the desktops, look into Branch Cache - you can leave the shares at HQ or the DC, but the local server will cache data so it feels fast to the users.

Otherwise, you can point the users' home drives at a share on the local server and use DFSR to sync that entire share back to the main DC at limited bandwidth or off-peak hours.

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Handiddy83OP•

Great info, thanks!

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qnull•

Yeah you're looking for DFS (distributed file system) if you're not already using it.

It's a windows server feature and shouldn't be too hard to implement but read up on it anyway.

You just setup a name space with some folder targets and member servers and setup the schedule. It helps to have a namespace because instead of the path being //server1/office/home or //server2/office/home it becomes //domain/office/home and the users don't notice if server2 goes offline.

You'll probably look at a wider deployment after this

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Handiddy83OP•

I will read up on this. This is good info and along the lines of what I was thinking just wanted to bang it off some other ears.

1