Lesson 6

Configuring File Services

Planning a File Server Deployment

Scalability – Be thinking about current and future needs how much are you going to need 3 to 5years from now. Do you have any archiving policy set into practice?

Navigation – How are user going to be able to locate the files they need access to.

Protection – Who needs access and how are you going to manage it?

Abuse – How are you going to control users from using up too much space on the file servers?

Diversity – How to provide access for users who are not running Windows operating sytems?

Fault tolerance – How quickly can you recover from failure of a hard drive, server or entire facility?

Availability – How can you make sure that users have continuous access to critical files across you complete network even if it is remote?

The following is Windows 2008 Storage Limitations.

Storage Characteristic
Maximum Basic Volume - Limitation: 2 Terabytes

Maximum dynamic Volume size(simple and mirrored volumes)- Limitation: 2 Terabytes
Maximum dynamic Volume size(spanned and striped volumes)- Limitation: 64 terabytes (2 terabytes per disk with the max on 32 discs)

Maximum dynamic Volume size(RAID-5 volumes)- Limitation: 64 terabytes (2 terabytes per disk with the max on 32 discs and 2 terabytes reserved for parity info.)

Maximum NTFS Volume size - Limitation: 2 to the power of 32 clusters minus 1 cluster (using the default 4 kilobyte cluster size, the max volume size is 16 terabytes minus 64 kilobytes. Using the max 64 kilobytes cluster size, the max vol. size is 256 terabytes minus 64 kilobytes. )

Maximum number of clusters on a NTFS Volume - Limitation: 2 to the power of 32

Maximum NTFS file size - Limitation: 2 to the power of 44 (16 terabytes) minus 64 kilobytes

Maximum number of files on an NTFS Volume - Limitation: 2 to the power of 32 minus one file.

Maximum Number of Volumes on a server - Limitation: Approx 2000(1000 dynamic and the rest basic)

When installing additional storage you must address the following tasks:

Select a partitioning style – there are two types supported MBR (Master Boot Record) and GUID(Global Unique Identifier). You will need to choose one or the other not both.

Select a disc type – there are two types supported basic and dynamic. You can use both disk types on the same disk, but you can not mix disk types on the same computer.

Divide the disk into partitions or volumes – You create partitions on basic disks and volumes on dynamic disks.

Format the partitions or volumes with a file system – the two file systems that are support are NTFS and FAT ( Fat 16 & Fat 32)

During installation two partitions are created system and a boot partition. The System partition contains hardware related files that the computer uses to boot. The boot partition contains the operating system files which are stored in the windows directory. You can create up to four primary partitions.
Volume Types

Simple volume – Is a single disk and once you have created a simple volume you can later extend it to multiple disks to create a spanned or a stripped volume as long as it is not a system or boot volume.

Spanned volume – Consists of space from 2 to 32 physical disks, all of which must be dynamic disks. A spanned volume is essentially a method for combining the space for multiple disks into a single large volume.

Striped volume – Consists of space from 2 to 32 physical disks, all of which must be dynamic disks. The difference between a striped volume and and spanned volume is that is a striped volume, the system writes data one stripe at a time to each successive disk in the volume.

Mirrored volume – Consists of an identical amount of space on two physical disks, both of which must be dynamic. The system then performs all read and write operations on both disk simultaneously, so they contain duplicate copies of the data.

RAID-5 volume – Consists of space on three or more physical disks, all of which must be dynamic disk. The system stripes data and parity information across all of the disks, so that is on disk fails, the missing data then can be recreated using the parity information on the other disks.

File Sharing and Permissions

Now that you have the volumes set up you will need to set up a file structure and a sharing strategy following a basic Structure set the root of organizations public and private shares.

Public
Accounting
Customer service
General Access
Human Resources
Information Systems
Marketing
Purchasing
Sales
Private
Bob Johnson
Cindy Johnsen
Dan Mann
Nick Nickleson
Paul Pusher
Steven Sales

Permissions then can be set at the individual level to the private directories on as groups on the public directories. The following are the four different types of permissions:
• Share permissions
• NTFS permissions
• Registry permissions
• Active Directory permissions

All of these permissions can operate independently of each other and sometime combine to increase protection of a specific resource. NTFS permissions enable you to control access to files and folders by specifying just what tasks individual users can perform on them. Share permissions provide rudimentary access control for all of the files on a network share. Network users must have the proper share and NTFS permissions to access file server shares.

The File Services role includes several role services that you can choose to install, including Distributed File System and Services for Network File System. Selecting individual role services can add extra configuration pages to the Add Roles Wizard.

The Distributed File System (DFS) includes two technologies: DFS Namespaces and DFS Replication, which can simplify the process of locating files, control the amount of traffic passing over WAN links, provide users at remote sites with local file server access, configure the network to survive a WAN link failure, and facilitate consistent backups.

DFS is a virtual namespace technology that enables you to create a single directory tree containing references to shared folders located on various file servers all over the network.

A namespace server functions just like a file server except that when a user requests access to a file in the DFS directory tree, the namespace server replies—not with the file itself, but with a referral specifying the file’s actual location.