Migrate DFS to Azure File Sync. Let's consider that you're
currently aggregating multiple file shares into a single DFS
tree infrastructure. And going further,
you've enabled DFS replication to have multiple
servers in your on‑premises environment,
maintaining copies of those shared folders.
DFS has been around in Windows Server for many years as a way to make
file shares more accessible across your organization.
Now that we have AFS and you see how easy it is to install the agent on
servers, register them into sync groups and get syncing, you might wonder how
can we migrate DFSR to AFS? It's really straightforward.
There's no magic to it.
Of course, you're going to want to create a sync group.
I would start with the root of the DFS tree,
install the AFS agent on the primary DFS host,
create a server endpoint. The big catch here is do not enable tiering.
You don't want to have unexpected behavior between DFS,
particularly DFS replication and AFS replication. Sync up the
files, follow suit with your other DFS hosts, and once the
entire file server army, as it were,
has its file share synchronizing, now you would need to structure
those sync groups in the cloud appropriately.
At that point, you can retire DFS. Again,
it's nothing that normal logic,
it seems to me, wouldn't lead you to in terms of that migration, and that's good news, I think.