Using Microsoft Distributed File System Replication

Begin the process of managing DFS by launching your instance and connecting it to the Microsoft Active Directory where you joined your Amazon FSx file systems. To do this, choose one of the following procedures from the Amazon Directory Service Administration Guide:

Connect to your instance as an Active Directory user that is a member of the file system administrators group. In Amazon Managed AD, this group is called Amazon Delegated FSx Administrators. In your self-managed Microsoft AD, this group is called Domain Admins or the custom name for the administrators group that you provided during creation.

This user must also be a member of a group that has DFS administration permissions delegated to it. In Amazon Managed AD, this group is called Amazon Delegated Distributed File System Administrators. In your self-managed AD, this user must be a member of Domain Admins or another group to which you delegated DFS administration permissions.

For more information, see Connecting to Your Windows Instance in the Amazon EC2 User Guide.

Download the FSx-DFSr-Setup.ps1 PowerShell script.

Open the Start menu and enter PowerShell. From the list, choose Windows PowerShell.

Run the PowerShell script with the following specified parameters to establish DFS Replication between your two file systems:

FSx-DFSr-Setup.ps1 -group Group -folder Folder -path ContentPath -primary FSxFileSystem1-DNS-Name -standby FSxFileSystem2-DNS-Name

Begin the process of managing DFS by launching your instance and connecting it to the Microsoft Active Directory where you joined your Amazon FSx file systems. To do this, choose one of the following procedures from the Amazon Directory Service Administration Guide:

Connect to your instance as an Active Directory user that is a member of the file system administrators group. In Amazon Managed AD, this group is called Amazon Delegated FSx Administrators. In your self-managed Microsoft AD, this group is called Domain Admins or the custom name for the administrators group that you provided during creation.

This user must also be a member of a group that has DFS administration permissions delegated to it. In Amazon Managed AD, this group is called Amazon Delegated Distributed File System Administrators. In your self-managed AD, this user must be a member of Domain Admins or another group to which you delegated DFS administration permissions.

For more information, see Connecting to Your Windows Instance in the Amazon EC2 User Guide.

Open the Start menu and enter PowerShell. From the list, choose Windows PowerShell.

If you don't have DFS Management Tools installed already, install them on your instance with the following command.

Install-WindowsFeature RSAT-DFS-Mgmt-Con

From the PowerShell prompt, create a DFS Replication group and folder with the following commands.

$Group = "Name of the DFS Replication group"
$Folder = "Name of the DFS Replication folder"

New-DfsReplicationGroup –GroupName $Group
New-DfsReplicatedFolder –GroupName $Group –FolderName $Folder

Determine the Active Directory computer name associated with each file system with the following commands.

$Primary = "DNS name of the primary FSx file system"
$Standby = "DNS name of the standby FSx file system"

$C1 = (Get-ADObject -Filter "objectClass -eq 'Computer' -and ServicePrincipalName -eq 'HOST/$Primary'").Name
$C2 = (Get-ADObject -Filter "objectClass -eq 'Computer' -and ServicePrincipalName -eq 'HOST/$Standby'").Name

Add your file systems as members of the DFS Replication group that you created with the following commands.

Add-DfsrMember –GroupName $Group –ComputerName $C1
Add-DfsrMember –GroupName $Group –ComputerName $C2

Use the following commands to add the local path (for example, D:\share) for each file system to the DFS Replication group. In this procedure, file system 1 serves as the primary member, meaning that its contents initially are synced to the other file system.

$ContentPath1 = "Local path to the folder you want to replicate on file system 1"
$ContentPath2 = "Local path to the folder you want to replicate on file system 2"
                
Set-DfsrMembership –GroupName $Group –FolderName $Folder –ContentPath $ContentPath1 –ComputerName $C1 –PrimaryMember $True
Set-DfsrMembership –GroupName $Group –FolderName $Folder –ContentPath $ContentPath2 –ComputerName $C2 –PrimaryMember $False

Add a connection between the file systems with the following command.

Add-DfsrConnection –GroupName $Group –SourceComputerName $C1 –DestinationComputerName $C2

If you don't already have DFS Namespace servers running, launch a pair of highly available DFS Namespace servers using the setup-DFSN-servers.template Amazon CloudFormation template. For more information on creating an Amazon CloudFormation stack, see Creating a Stack on the Amazon CloudFormation Console in the Amazon CloudFormation User Guide.

Connect to one of the DFS Namespace servers launched in the previous step as a user in the Amazon Delegated Administrators group. For more information, see Connecting to Your Windows Instance in the Amazon EC2 User Guide.

Open the DFS Management console. Open the Start menu and run dfsmgmt.msc. Doing this opens the DFS Management GUI tool.

For Action, choose New Namespace, and enter the computer name of the first DFS Namespace server that you launched for Server and choose Next.

For Name, enter the namespace you're creating (for example, corp).

Choose Edit Settings and set the appropriate permissions based on your requirements. Choose Next.

Keep the default Domain-based namespace option selected, keep the Enable Windows Server 2008 mode option selected, and choose Next.

Review the namespace settings and choose Create.

With the newly created namespace selected under Namespaces in the navigation bar, choose Action, then Add Namespace Server.

For Namespace server, enter the computer name of the second DFS Namespace server that you launched.

Choose Edit Settings, set the appropriate permissions based on your requirements, and choose OK.

Choose Add, enter the UNC name of the file share on the primary Amazon FSx file system (for example \\fs-0123456789abcdef0.example.com\share) for Path to folder target, and choose OK.

Choose Add, enter the UNC name of the file share on the standby Amazon FSx file system (for example, \\fs-fedbca9876543210f.example.com\share) for Path to folder target, and choose OK.

From the New Folder window, choose OK. The new folder is created with the two folder targets under your namespace.

Repeat the last three steps for each file share that you want to add to your namespace.

If you don't already have DFS Namespace servers running, launch a pair of highly available DFS Namespace servers using the setup-DFSN-servers.template Amazon CloudFormation template. For more information on creating an Amazon CloudFormation stack, see Creating a Stack on the Amazon CloudFormation Console in the Amazon CloudFormation User Guide.

Connect to one of the DFS Namespace servers launched in the previous step as a user in the Amazon Delegated Administrators group. For more information, see Connecting to Your Windows Instance in the Amazon EC2 User Guide.

Open the Start menu and enter PowerShell. Windows PowerShell appears in the list of matches.

Open the context (right-click) menu for Windows PowerShell and choose Run as Administrator.

If you don't have DFS Management Tools installed already, install it on your instance with the following command.

Install-WindowsFeature RSAT-DFS-Mgmt-Con

If you don't already have an existing DFS Namespace, you can create one using the following PowerShell commands.

$NSS1 = computer name of the 1st DFS Namespace server
$NSS2 = computer name of the 2nd DFS Namespace server

$DNSRoot = fully qualified Active Directory domain name (e.g. mydomain.com)
$Namespace = Namespace name you want to use
$Folder = Folder path you want to use within the Namespace
$FS1FolderTarget = Share path to Folder Target on File System 1
$FS2FolderTarget = Share path to Folder Target on File System 2

$NSS1,$NSS2 | ForEach-Object { Invoke-Command –ComputerName $_ –ScriptBlock { mkdir “C:\DFS\${using:Namespace}”;
New-SmbShare –Name ${using:Namespace} –Path “C:\DFS\${using:Namespace}” } }

New-DfsnRoot -Path "\\${DNSRoot}\${Namespace}" -TargetPath "\\${NSS1}.${DNSRoot}\${Namespace}" -Type DomainV2
New-DfsnRootTarget -Path "\\${DNSRoot}\${Namespace}" -TargetPath "\\${NSS2}.${DNSRoot}\${Namespace}"

To create a folder within your DFS Namespace, you can use the following PowerShell command. Doing this creates a folder that directs compute instances accessing the folder to your primary Amazon FSx file system by default.

$FS1 = DNS name of primary FSx file system
New-DfsnFolder –Path “\\${DNSRoot}\${Namespace}\${Folder}" -TargetPath “\\${FS1}\${FS1FolderTarget}” –EnableTargetFailback $True –ReferralPriorityClass GlobalHigh

Add your standby Amazon FSx file system to the same DFS Namespace folder. Compute instances accessing the folder fall back to this file system if they can't connect to the primary Amazon FSx file system.

$FS2 = DNS name of secondary FSx file system
New-DfsnFolderTarget –Path “\\${DNSRoot}\${Namespace}\${Folder}" -TargetPath “\\${FS2}\${FS2FolderTarget}”