Hello all,
Our shop is purchasing two Dell PowerEdge servers and an MD3000i iSCSI PowerVault. They are replacing 5 year old PowerEdge servers that are clustered with an old PowerVault as well.
Our goal is to make sure we have 100% up time during hours of operation (12 hours of the day) and make sure all files are accessible and users are able to authenticate to the Active Directory domain.
We will be installing Win2K3 64-bit Enterprise Server on them.
The servers were originally clustered to have a shared namespace so that if either authentication server goes down, users still have access.
Now, MS doesn’t recommend clustering Domain Controllers and with the problems I’ve witnessed with the current clustered servers, I want to stay away from it with the new ones.
DFS seems like a better choice but with iSCSI technology, which I’m not very familiar with, I am getting a bit confused at how it works and what my solution might be for keeping files accessible. I’m not sure if iSCSI can allow two machines to access the same logical drive like clustering can or if I am supposed to create some shares on one server, some on the other, and use DFS without replication (since it’s not needed as the data is all on the iSCSI array).
So, finally to the point, can anyone advise as to whether DFS is a good solution (and if what I described can even work with iSCSI) or if there might be a better solution out there considering I’m using iSCSI?
Any links or advice would be much appreciated!