A questionnaire for our DFS Namespaces users

First published on TECHNET on Jul 23, 2007
The DFS Namespaces team is interested in learning more about how our customers are using namespaces. The answers to these questions will help them when considering future changes to DFS Namespaces. You can send your response via the "Email" link on this blog.

• What do you use DFS (namespace) for?
  – User home directory/drive
  – Software distribution
  – Other (explain)
• Approximately how many domain-based and standalone DFS namespaces do you have?
• What are the factors influencing your decision on whether you want a domain-based or  standalone DFS namespace, and/or using MSCS (clustering) with DFS namespaces?
• In your biggest DFS namespace (standalone or domain-based):
  – How many links do you have? Is the maximum decided on the basis of necessity or other factors (please explain)
  – What's the maximum number of link targets do you have for any DFS link? Is the maximum decided on basis of necessity or other factors (explain)?
  – If domain-based, how many root targets do you have? How distributed are these (Across the globe etc)?
• How frequently do you
  – Create or delete links?
  –  add/remove link  targets?
  – Add/remote root targets?
• How do you manage your namespaces? Why?
  – Built-in Windows DFS Management UI
  – DFSUTIL/DFSCMD(Would you like it to be scriptable using PowerShell and/or .NET)
  – Home-grown or free community utilities and scripts. What do they do?
  – Commercial tools. What were the critical features they provided?
• What is your wish list related to scalability/performance/manageability/features
• What are the manageability requirements related to:
  – Moving shares from one server to another:
  – Splitting shares or namespaces
  – Adding new storage into the namespace
  – Detection and clean-up of stale links
  – Detection and clean-up of non-existent users
  – ACL delegation at different parts of the namespace
  – Quota control at the leaf of the namespace
• What current considerations (if any) related to namespace management, performance or functionality is preventing you from deploying more servers?
• What functionality would let you expand the usage of global, geo-distributed namespaces?