Migrate from DFS to NAS

Question

To simplify things, I'll pare down the environment.

-Single Namespace\Namespace server\Folder Target

-No replication

Data is accessible using \HostDomain\DFSRootName

Namespace server is running on W2K8 while the target is running on W2K3. We need to retire the W2K3 server and management has no interest in maintaining DFS. DFS was originally setup awhile back for POC, but done so using Production target data.

I don't know if this is possible, but can we migrate the data to NAS and create a CNAME for the \HostDomain.

The ultimate goal is for the transition to be transparent to the user.

Answer 1

In a word, no.

If you have a domain-based namespace, which it sounds like you do, then there's things going on between DCs and the roots that can't be undone without changing the UNC path of the share.

Simply aliasing the base domain name to a file server would certainly break other things.

The way I see it you've got a couple of options:

1. Leave namespace as it is and just change the target to a different server or a NAS

   This is pretty much the only way to make it seamless for the users. It means keeping DFS around, but depending how that's configured (where the root is hosted, how many servers you have, how much data you have, how many targets/folders you have) that's not necessarily a bad thing. DFS is really quite handy. You might even find other uses for it.

2. Change the path

   This allows you to ditch DFS and the old W2K3 server and move the data to anywhere you want. If you set it up such that users point to a CNAME instead of the actual location's hostname, then you've gained some level of abstraction/future proofing in that you can just change the DNS records down the road to "move the data" without impacting clients.