Setting up a Server Cluster/Server Mirror?

seamus

Probably a particularly simple one.

I have two servers. Indentical hardware and identical setup, running Win2k3.

I want to have each server to be an identical copy of eachother, essentially running as a cluster, or even in load balancing. They will be used to store files, so whenever a file is updated on one, it's updated on the other.

Obviously, I want this to be transparent to the users - they simply access a single hostname, and are presented with a list of shares, as per usual.

Now that I type it out, I'm guessing that Win2k3 (Std. Edition) won't support this out of the box, and I'll need another server/OS to act as the front end and co-ordinate the other two?

Ginger

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/evaluation/features/featuresorterresults.aspx

Select clustering and you see that Enterprise only

Righty.. I am only speculating here but this might help...

Server A (SA) + Server B (SB)

Client machines have the their hosts files edited to point to say Server depending on which one they will use..

Very very very clunky but doesnt allow if one fails for the other to back up and doesnt allow for mirroring

Actually its a silly idea..

WizZard

Sounds like you need DFS, if it's just file storage this will be used for.

seamus

Yeah I stumbled across DFS, and it seems to do what I want to do, but it's a little weird to set up, so I'll need to read up on it somewhat.

Cheers guys

seamus

OK, I went with DFS.

I'm just having some trouble with replicating, in that, it's not.

It seems to be all set up correctly, but it's doing weird things.

I have a DFS Share "Home" set up on two server, we'll call them ServerA and ServerB.

I've also set up a logon script: When a user logs on, it checks to see if a folder for them exists on the Home share. If not, it creates one. Then it maps this folder to their H:\.

When I go to
\\my.domain\DFSRoot\Home

It only shows some of the folders. When I came in this morning, I thought that the logon script wasn't working right. But actually, when I go to
\\ServerA\Home
I see the contents of the Home DFS Share. But when I go to
\\ServerB\Home
I see all of the other users' home folders.

And the files/folders aren't replicating across, even though the DFS console says replication is on and working.

Running W2k3 Standard Edition. Anyone messed with this before?

seamus

Sorted.

For anyone who comes a-googlin':

There's a File Replication Log in the event viewer on the affected machines.

Both machine were giving me the same error:
Event ID 13539
"The File Replication Service cannot replicate c:\data1\home because the pathname of the replicated directory is not the fully qualified pathname of an existing, accessible local directory."

Now, DATA1 on both machines is a RAID volume. For neatness sake, I decided to mount the volumes in a folder instead of a drive letter. I did get an error before when setting up DFS relating to this.

So I mounted the RAID volume on E:\ on both machines and changed the share path to e:\home. Then I deleted and rebuilt the DFS share, and hey presto they instantly replicated.
Obviously the file replication service uses some sort of low-level data access system where it locates the UNC path to the local disk. If it tried to use
\\disk0\vol1\DATA1 (for example) to access the RAID volume, this would fail.

Interesting.

WizZard

Delighted you got it wokring. As a matter of interest would you mind posting/sending me the script that you use for creating users directories. I was under the impression that the logon script runs under the context of the domain user that called it and thus to create a home directory they would have to have write access to that share (home directory's root)?

It's entirely possible that I got the wrong end of the stick on this though