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himcrucified
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

High Availability (Redundant) UEM Share

I'm trying to determine the best method for providing a high availability file share for UEM configs and user data files. I've looked into DFS-R (while disabling multiple login sessions) and this seems better than nothing, but even if I dial down the client namespace cache down to 1 second the user shares will still hang if one of the servers is rebooted or fails. This would also interrupt any user files that are open, file transfers that are in progress, etc..

Therefore I was thinking that maybe a better solution would be to leverage the SMB (3.0) Transpartent Failover feature outlined here: SMB Transparent Failover – making file shares continuously available – clausjor

Has anyone tried these methods (or others) that they would recommend? Any thoughts, considerations or experiences that would be helpful in determining the best path forward?

8 Replies
tbro
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I am currently using DFS-R for this in my environment with 1 server per site. We have not experienced any real issues so far using this mechanism. We did simulate a failover during our testing phase and had the server powered down. We were immediately able to log in to our second site with no UEM issues.

himcrucified
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Cool. I just setup a MS Failover Cluster to test this week. I successfully migrated the UEM shares to it this morning and plan on testing out how live desktops are affected when a server node goes down. I've been impressed so far with the failover capability. When I kick off a large file transfer and try to interrupt it by rebooting one of the cluster nodes the transfer stops for a few seconds (1-20 seconds) and then picks right back up as the cluster migrates the file server role over to the other node. It's pretty cool. I'm hoping this will mean little to no disruption to users on desktops with redirected data on the failover cluster.

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ijdemes
Expert
Expert

DFS-R is only supported for the Flex Config share and not the Profile Archive share, as stated in the following article:

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2113460


\\ Ivan
---
Twitter: @ivandemes
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tbro
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

We do not allow users to have multiple sessions in our environment.

The following KB states that DFS-R can be used in this scenario.

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2137300

BC559
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

We don't allow users to run multiple sessions

2 Sites

each site has 2 servers using MS Failover Clustering

point UEM shares to the cluster object

Use DFS-R to replicate between the site

Works great.

MikeC3964
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

BC559​ and tbro​,

I believe I plan on doing the same idea you're doing in your environment and just want to confirm that this sounds ok. We're going to have 2 pods, a UEM server in each pod with DFS-R, syncing between the two file shares. This is supported as long we as don't allow multiple sessions where someone might have a session in each pod? What if someone has multiple sessions in the same pod? That likely won't happen, I was just curious.

Thanks,
Mike

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jooji_marsh
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

BC559, is that replicate the UEM conf, profile and user data to the secondary site one way. So your 2 site setup is active/passive and all users login to one datacentre?

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BC559
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

It is two way. The sites are Active/Active

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