I'm wondering if it's a good idea to use DFS to sync content across a web farm? Does anyone have any experience of this? We've used Robocopy in the past but found it a little patchy and clunky. Essentially we want to avoid having to make ten changes to content each time one file changes (this happens a lot since our site is old and usues classic ASP.)
From what I gather, DFS is usually meant for geographically seperated locations and used to make the UNC shares appear simpler to users and easier to manage.
What I'd like to achieve with it is to only copy content changes to one of ten servers which will be the hub. I'd then configure the other nine servers as spokes using FRS.
Any thoughts on this methodology or suggestions for better setups would be much appreciated.
For performance reasons, don't point a web site to a UNC path. SMB file access is horribly inefficient and slow compared to pretty much any other file access method.
You can use DFS-R (via Windows 2003 R2) to enable replication between DFS-enabled shares, but definitely setup IIS to point to the share's local path, not UNC.