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I am looking to add redundancy to our DFS shares and want to utilize a new iSCSI SAN array in the process. I am thinking of having two servers (one virtual, one physical - sitting on different hosts) connected to a common SAN LUN, both providing DFS access.

If I am not mistaken, DFS was created to facilitate replication between two different storage arrays but share a common name space, so will DFS work in the scenario above since in theory it would be trying to replicate to a shared common storage array? What would be some alternatives?

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I am thinking of having two servers (one virtual, one physical - sitting on different hosts) connected to a common SAN LUN, both providing DFS access.

No. With the exception of Hyper-V CFS etups, NTFS can NOT HANDLE MORE THAN ONE COMPUTER ACCESSING A DISC. It is not a cluster capable file system.

If you have 2 servers connecting to one lun EACH, it will work (löike if they have local discs).

If the access the same disc, they will show file system corruption.

Not a DFS issue - an NTFS issue.

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Thank you, I had a good feeling this wouldn't work and was searching for some reasons. Can you recommend anything to provide fault tolerance to the DFS Namespace while still utilizing a shared data source? Would I have to do Windows Clustering? – Sangheili Aug 5 '10 at 17:00
I would not do it. Thre ARE shared file systems (you need to buy them separate - quite expensive) but if a dying server kills the file system, the damage is done. You could also use a file server cluster with the share assiened as cluster ressource. But at the end, replication is pretty much mandatory for high uptime. – TomTom Aug 5 '10 at 19:58
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