Jose Barreto of MS has written a long article on the basics of Windows Server 2008 Distributed File System. I’m amazed how many people don’t know anything about DFS Namespace or DFS Replication (DFS-R). I was using DFS back in Windows 2003 for the namespace. It meant our logon scripts only had to map one drive even if we had shares all over the place. It also made it easy to move file shares around or even fail over to a DR file server without users even knowing. We also used DFS-R’s predecessor, FRS (File Replication Service) for replicating static data like RIS images and MSI packages. It was flaky! DFS-R is a complete re-write and gives block level replication. It can even do some de-duplication if you throw a single Enterprise edition server into the mix via cross-file replication.