Discussion on:

When to use mount points for Windows servers

I was speaking to customer whose Exchange cluster recognized the mount points but couldn't access it after a sudden power-loss. Somehow ADS lost authentication. I think? Weird? The problem involved cluster services not starting under an authenticated ADS account. The solution was to select it's properties and re-add the user account and password. Voila. All fixed. I guess Exchange clusters are very brittle?

Linux has been doing it for years. It provides great flexibility, and the end-user doesn't "need to know" the details.

When we start on a new project, it often gets its own physical drive. Sometimes, a single customer area will have its own physical drive. With mount points, it's all magic, handled behind-the-scenes by the OS:

Consider for example, an IIS server -
You could create "C:\IIS\" as your data area, and then mount separate physical drives as "C:\IIS\WWW" and "C:\IIS\FTP" and "C:\IIS\MAIL"

Or continuing the same logic, you could mount different customers onto separate physical drives, such as "C:\IIS\WWW\CUSTOMER1", "C:\IIS\WWW\CUSTOMER2" and so on. If some area gets too big, you might even mount "C:\IIS\WWW\CUSTOMER1\BLOGS" to expand their space.

The same idea applies in-house, if a project grows too big - the "D:\DATA\PROJECT1" directory could be moved onto a separate drive, and then mounted back into the same place in the directory structure. End-users don't even know it happened; suddenly, they're not crunched for space any more. Their applications, bookmarks, and directory references are not even aware of the change.

Mount points provide limitless flexibility, good compartmentalization, and the technical details are transparent to the end-user. Access is controlled through standard security policies.

And "running out of drive letters" becomes a thing of the past.

and workstations
(especially helpful in peer work groups)

anyone remember from DOS:
- Assign
- Join

I used to use these to trick applications & games etc. into installing onto a separate partition or even other drives,
it sure made those old game run faster working off of 2 disks & the CD rather than having all of the data on one

I once had a win2K workstation with a very small & almost stuffed C:\ drive
I used a mount point to another partition and moved the entire Office 2000 suite program data from Program Files\...
and it didn't even whine once
windows whined at first when I grabbed the folder and dropped it onto the root of the C:\
and then re-created the same folder as a mount point within Program Files and "moved" everything back to the "new location" which office assumed was still on the C: drive

I mainly use mount points now on my home network (Peer Work Group no real server)
to provide single entry points to access all my data on other machines:
- create a single shared folder
then mount every drive/partition in sub-folders inside the share
- bingo all drives & files / Data etc. on the system accessible in the one share.

I have tried setting up a mount point on a DFS share in a test environment (2008 server R1), mounting the volume directly in/on the replicated folder.
After starting and verifying the replication I brutally removed the volume from the mount point to see what happened, and DFS basically seemed to think that I'd deleted all files, and removed them from the replicating partner as well.
The question is if 2008 R2 is more aware of mount points, or if Microsoft is planning to implement it in any future releases. Insight is welcome!