Profile Management

Scenario 5 - Load-balancing user stores

“I want to load-balance my users across several geographically adjacent networked user stores (NUSs).”

Background reading

Unlike Scenario 1, this scenario has a single site that is large enough to require multiple NUSs. Using DFS namespaces, we can improve on the solution in Scenario 1.

Scenario 1 (Option 1) used DFS Namespaces to map multiple sites to different folders on the same server. You can use a similar technique to map subfolders of a namespace to folders on different servers.

Ideally, you need an AD attribute that partitions user accounts into similarly sized chunks, such as #department#. As in Scenario 1, #department# must always be defined and must be guaranteed to contain a correct folder name.

As in Scenario 1, we set up a namespace for the NUS called \\MyCorp\Profiles.

This diagram shows how to set up the namespace.

Diagram

Once you complete the setup, you configure the Path to user store setting as:

\\MyCorp\Profiles\#l#\#department#

With this configuration, the users in Wagga Wagga are distributed across two NUS servers, both local.

Scenario 5 - Load-balancing user stores