placiing content and application on a microsoft DFS solution

["M.H.G. Emmerig" <M....@DNB.NL>]

Has anyone ever placed an application and its content on a redundant DFS
solution?
So as when one DFS server fails, another takes over.
Does anyone see possible problems with this setup?
ie. when dfs server fails does tomcat loose connection to the app or is the
failover fast enough.


regards

Milko Emmerig



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Re: placiing content and application on a microsoft DFS solution

[Peter Crowther <pe...@melandra.com>]

On 22 June 2010 16:10, M.H.G. Emmerig <M....@dnb.nl> wrote:

>
>
> Has anyone ever placed an application and its content on a redundant DFS
> solution?
> So as when one DFS server fails, another takes over.
> Does anyone see possible problems with this setup?
> ie. when dfs server fails does tomcat loose connection to the app or is the
> failover fast enough.
>
> At best, the failover takes several seconds, during which your app will
fail to respond.  Depending on your load and application design, the queued
requests may be sufficient to run you out of heap memory, database handles
and similar.

I assume your goal is to improve reliability of end-user access to your
application.  If you have to use Windows, why would you take a DFS approach
rather than using Windows' file replication to replicate files to multiple
servers?  The probability of network failure or poor performance is orders
of magnitude higher than the probability of HDD subsystem failure or poor
performance, so I would expect accessing apps from a remote network drive to
worsen your reliability rather than improve it.

- Peter