Distributed File System (Microsoft)
Distributed File System (DFS) is a set of client and server services that allow an organization using Microsoft Windows servers to organize many distributed SMB file shares into a distributed file system. DFS has two components to its service: Location transparency (via the namespace component) and Redundancy (via the file replication component). Together, these components enable data availability in the case of failure or heavy load by allowing shares in multiple different locations to be logically grouped under one folder, the "DFS root". Microsoft's DFS is referred to interchangeably as 'DFS' and 'Dfs' by Microsoft and is unrelated to the DCE Distributed File System, which held the 'DFS' trademark but was discontinued in 2005. It is also called "MS-DFS" or "MSDFS" in some contexts, e.g. in the Samba user space project. Overview There is no requirement to use the two components of DFS together; it is perfectly possible to use the logical namespace component without using DFS file replication, and it is perfectly possible to use file replication between servers without combining them into one namespace. A DFS root can only exist on a server version of Windows (from Windows NT 4.0 and up) and OpenSolaris (in kernel space) or