A namespace is a virtual view of shared folders in an organization. The path to a namespace is similar to a Universal Naming Convention (UNC) path to a shared folder, such as \\Server1\Public\Software\Tools. In this example, the shared folder Public and its subfolders Software and Tools are all hosted on Server1.

If you want to give users a single place to locate data, but you want to host data on different servers for availability and performance purposes, you can deploy a namespace similar to the one shown in the following figure. The elements of this namespace are described following the figure.

DFS Namespaces technology elements
Note

Folders can contain folder targets or other DFS folders, but not both at the same level in the folder hierarchy.

You can administer namespaces by using DFS Management, the DfsUtil command, or scripts that call WMI.

Additional references