Chapter 30. File System Fault Tolerance

In This Chapter

• Examining Windows Server 2003 File System Services

• Using Fault-Tolerant Disk Arrays

• Managing File Share Access and Volume Usage

• Leveraging the Capabilities of File Server Resource Manager

• Monitoring Disks and Volumes

• Working with Operating System Files: Fault Tolerance

• Using the Distributed File System Replication

• Planning a DFS Deployment

• Installing DFS

• Optimizing DFS

• Managing and Troubleshooting DFS

• Backing Up DFS

• Handling Remote Storage

• Using the Volume Shadow Copy Service

Modern businesses rely heavily on their computing infrastructure, especially when it comes to accessing data. Users access databases and files on a regular basis, and when the necessary data is unavailable, productivity can suffer and money can be lost. Also, when new file servers are added to the environment to replace old file servers or just to accommodate additional load, administrators must change user login scripts and mapped drive designations but may also need to manually copy large amounts of data from one server to another. Keeping heavily used file servers optimized by regularly checking disks for errors or file fragmentation and archiving data to create additional free disk space can take considerable time. In most cases, such tasks require taking the server offline, leaving the data inaccessible.

In this chapter, we highlight the technologies built into Windows Server 2003 that help improve reliable file system access. This chapter also covers best practices on ways to implement these technologies as well as ways to maintain and support the file system services to keep information access reliable and recoverable.