[Samba] Why using several Samba4 servers?

[Dieter Modig]

Hi! 

 We're trying to figure out the best way to use samba4 in our environment
and after testing back and forth we are now left with a question; why would
we want to have several samba4 servers? 

 The environment is one HQ with multiple branch offices where each branch
office as a network connection to HQ with at least a 2Mbit DSL. The initial
idea was to put a samba4 DC in every branch office to lighten the load on
HQ DC and network connection. However after having tested this we couldn't
get failover/reduncency to work as we figured it should. 

 We set up the first DC added clients, users, policies and profiles. Worked
like a charm. Added a second DC and then made sure all log files said
replication was OK and we could see the second DC in administration tools.
So then we took the first DC offline and naturally things like policies
stopped working (since clients ask for specific DNS entries and those point
to the first DC). 

 Reading up on howtos, googling like mad and
thinking about this we found
no real way to make this work as our initial idea. So the question remains;
is there any point in running more than one Samba4 DC for redundancy/load
balacing issues or is the only point to have it as a backup? 

Regards,
/Dieter