I have a client who currently only has one AD site, will be expanding to three sites by early next year and will have a fourth site a year after that. Their current single site is made of two physical sites connected with a 1 Gbps fiber strand running between the two buildings. The main building generally has about 150 users, the smaller building currently has 15 users though that number is likely to increase over the next few months. the smaller building currently does not have any local server though I believe it likely there will be a domain/file/print/wsus server implemented there before the end of the year. the three new sites are each going to start with only 2-3 users but will need to be able to scale to 8-10 each in the near future.

the organization's users will be close to 100% mobile between the sites, with 70%+ of the users using both a laptop and a workstation. A small number will also use an RDSSH server. There is the requirement to prevent loss of data through the laptops and make sure that their profile data is accessible on any of the machines. Connectivity between the new sites and the current site (main office) will likely be less than 10 Mbps, though will be three 9s reliability.

Something in the solution is definitely going to involve folder redirection. Offline access to the files will not be permitted. Client VPN and limited use RDSH server will be used for remote work.

Some of the users will be less mobile than others and will spend the majority of their time in one office, but there will certainly be some movement between all of the sites for all of the users at least occasionally.

Majority of the workstations are windows 7 pro with a few windows 8.1 pro machines.

All domain controllers and file servers are 2012 R2 with software assurance. It is probable that the domain controllers will get upgraded to server 2016 when it releases and at least some of the branch offices will also get server 2016.

I am trying to come up with a solution for access to redirected folders and it has me quite stumped.

I really want the answer to be to redirect folders to a dfs namespace and use replication to replicate it to the other file servers but I think from what I am finding that for redirected folders, this is not supported. Most of the entries I have found for this were generally for redirected folders with roaming profiles and I won't be using roaming profiles, but for the reasons for roaming profiles have problems, it would seem to make sense redirected folders would also. Does anyone have any conflicting thoughts on whether or not dfsr may be viable here and why?

At the moment, the best thing I am coming up with is redirecting everything to a file server in the main office and putting in a WAN accelerator on each end of the WAN connections to help improve performance, but this is not all that attractive for obvious reasons. I also considered using a hosted branch cache server, but I don't think this would help file redirection go back up the WAN connection, though would certainly be more cost effective than buying 4 WAN accelerators.

My other thought is just to use a Remote desktop session host located in the main office as the primary machine at the branch offices, but I am not 100% sure the users who frequently travel between the sites are going to be able to use that solution successfully.

Does anyone have any ideas/suggestions/comments?

What about this:

Am going to preface this with that I have never been able to deploy branchcache before and am not aware of familiar with its performance gains.

For every user, most of them will have a primary site. Redirect their folders to the local file server and use DFSr to send a copy back to the main office strictly for backup purposes. For the users which are highly mobile and don't really have a primary site, redirect them to the main office. Implement branchcache in all of the locations with content sources pointed to the redirected folder shares (as well as other production file shares) to improve performance if they are opening files from another site. I think I can use item level targeting to update the registry keys based on site for whether or not to use the cache...

Hi,

As you said, DFS with multiple targets could cause potential issues.

Like Scenario 2A/2B in this article:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/askds/archive/2010/09/01/microsoft-s-support-statement-around-replicated-user-profile-data.aspx

Branchcache should help at least on file shares. Another possible option is to use a cloud-based storage if it is supported. 

Note: you mentioned "DFSR to send a copy to main office for backup purpose". You should create backup schedule to do the backup as DFSR itself is not a backup solution since changes will be replicated after editing. 

DFSR to the main office where the Commvault infrastructure will back it up

In practice how much does branchcache improve performance? I am sure that it varies depending on the implementation. I could be wrong in my assumption that branchcache will only work for reads; I would think that branchcache would probably handle reads from a file share better than a WAN accelerator appliance, but a WAN accelerator has the benefit during writes back up the WAN connection, the client can write at gigabit speeds to the WAN appliance and then it sends the data up to the file share as bandwidth resources permit.

• Edited by gayscoffier 1 hour 43 minutes ago grammar