You are a network administrator for your company. The company has a main office and two branch offices. The branch offices are connected to the main office by T1 lines. The network consists of three Active Directory sites, one for each office. All client computers run either Windows 2000 Professional or Windows XP Professional.

Each office has a small data center that contains domain controllers, WINS, DNS, and DHCP servers, all running Windows Server 2003. Users in all offices connect to a file server in the main office to retrieve critical files. The network team reports that the WAN connections are severely congested during peak business hours. Users report poor file server performance during peak business hours. The design team is concerned that the file server is a single point of failure.

The design team requests a plan to alleviate the WAN congestion during business hours and to provide high availability for the file server. You need to provide a solution that improves file server performance during peak hours and that provides high availability for file services. You need to minimize bandwidth utilization.

What should you do?

A.
Purchase two high-end servers and a shared fiber-attached disk array. Implement a file server cluster in the main office by using both new servers and the shared fiber-attached disk array.

B.
Implement a stand-alone Distributed File System (DFS) root in the main office. Implement copies of shared folders for the branch offices. Schedule replication of shared folders to occur during off-peak hours by using scheduled tasks.

C.
Implement Offline Files on the client computers in the branch offices by using Synchronization Manager. Schedule synchronization to occur during off-peak hours.

D.
Implement a domain Distributed File System (DFS) root in the main office. Implement DFS replicas for the branch offices. Schedule replication to occur during off-peak hours.

Explanation:
A DFS root is effectively a folder containing links to shared files. A domain DFS root is stored in Active Directory. This means that users don’t need to know which physical server is hosting the shared files. All they do is open a folder in Active Directory and view a list of shared folders. A DFS replica is another server hosting the same shared files. We can configure replication between the file servers to replicate the shared files out of business hours. The users in each office will access the files from a DFS replica in the user’s office, rather than accessing the files over a WAN link.

Reference:

Jill Spealman, Kurt Hudson & Melissa Craft, MCSE Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-294); Planning, Implementing, and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Active Directory Infrastructure, Microsoft Press, Redmond, Washington, 2004, p. 12: 15