The Distributed File System (DFS) is a virtualization technology delivered over the SMB and MSRPC protocols. DFS allows administrators to group shared folders located on different servers by transparently connecting them to one or more DFS namespaces. A DFS namespace is a virtual view of shared folders in an organization. An administrator can select which shared folders to present in the namespace, design the hierarchy in which those folders appear and determine the names that the shared folders show in the namespace. When a user views the namespace, the folders appear to reside in a single, high-capacity file system. Users can navigate the folders in the namespace without needing to know the server names or shared folders hosting the data.
Only one share per system may be provisioned as a standalone DFS namespace. Domain-based DFS namespaces are not supported. Note that one DFS namespace may be provisioned per cluster, even if each cluster node has a separate storage pool. To provision a SMB share as a DFS namespace, use the DFS Management MMC Snap-in to create a standalone namespace.
When the appliance is not joined to an Active Directory domain, additional configuration is necessary to allow Workgroup users to modify DFS namespaces. To enable an SMB local user to create or delete a DFS namespace, that user must have a separate local account created on the server. For information about steps to let the SMB local user dfsadmin manipulate DFS namespaces, see Adding DFS Namespaces to a Local SMB Group.