[Samba] Dfs - Load Balancing

[Nicholas McDowell]

Thanks for your email Brian and the useful information.

The load balancing I was thinking about using was when you use a symbolic
link with multiple server names and a lb-data tag ie:

ln -s 'msdfs:serverA\someShare.msdfs:serverB\someShare' lb-data

Where someShare on serverA and serverB is the same file system containing
the same data.

Obviously this should only be used in a read only situation unless both
server have write access, which in the case of my setup, they do.

Cheers
Nicholas





> From: <brian at krusic.com>
> Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2003 20:40:32 -0500
> To: Nicholas McDowell <teknik at theorphanage.com>
> Cc: samba at lists.samba.org
> Subject: Re: [Samba] Dfs - Load Balancing
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I've also an interest in Dfs and plan implementation once I
> have sufccessfully gone to Samba 3.
> 
>> 1) How does it load balance?  Is it some sort of round robin?
> No, its more like autofs using NFS with sym links in the Unix
> world.
> 
> What I mean is that you can spread various data over several
> unique volumes and have them appear under the same dir
> structure.  This not only simplifies data management
> in "where are my files again" but it also allows you to
> spread network and disk i/o over several points.  Another
> advantage is that maintanance can be performend on a
> particular data location (ie; Raid) without affecting the
> entire directory or job structure.
> 
> All this is very old skewl stuff in the Unix world but is
> kinda new in the Windows world.
> 
> One thing to keep in mind is that the initial data request
> goes through the Dfs server in order to establish the mount
> point or network path but after that, subsequent requests go
> directly to that server bypassing the Dfs server.
> 
> As for the rest of your Q's, test and document your results.
> 
> Bri-