Best tool to sync DP's between window server

[spowell01]

For those of you with with your repositories living on windows servers, what tool are you using to sync them? We have 7 remote sites that are connected via a slow satellite link. I'm not much of a command line guy so i was looking for something with a GUI.

Ideally it would be somewhat of a central console that i could see all scheduled syncs and the status of them. I tried allway sync and it just wouldn't work with the latency. I am now trying richcopy, but it seems like i would need 7 separate instances of richcopy running in order to accomplish my goal?

Thanks for any advice!

[Kumarasinghe · Accepted solution]

We use this and works beautifully.
https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=4127#responseChild24180

[Kumarasinghe · Accepted solution]

We use this and works beautifully.
https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=4127#responseChild24180

[jarednichols]

We use Robocopy set up as scheduled tasks.

[spowell01]

Thanks for the reply's, I will check out that PS script Kumara.

[spowell01]

So, im using Kumara's script and I tested replication with 1 of our remote sites. This particular site has the best link (9-15MS delay vs 600-800MS at other sites), which I believe is a T1 link versus the satellite links the rest of the sites have. Our repository is just under 60 gigs total and this was the report from my first complete replication with the best site:

Replication to KIBSDCH1 started at 02/22/2013 15:51:12 Replication to KIBSDCH1 completed at 02/27/2013 01:46:46

as you can see it started on Friday and didn't complete until this morning. I would imagine im looking at, at least a week to get a full replication out to each rural site that has a sat link. Is this 5 day replication time normal for 60 gigs? im wondering if robocopy isn't the best solution for us.....

[donmontalvo · Accepted solution]

@spowel01 For full replication in remote locations...

external image link

[spowell01]

nice, but we cant even send fedex since they only receive regular mail at these sites :)

Back to the situation, I was under the impression that robocopy only copies changes by default. I started the replication task again yesterday after it completed....and its still running today. That's with 0 changes. Seems to me that it is not only copying changes.

[Kumarasinghe]

It copies only the changes.

[donmontalvo]

@spowell01 Got Riverbed?

[nkalister]

hey don, I've got riverbeds, but it hasn't created any issues for my replication (i'm using robocopy) that I've noticed.
What have you seen the riverbeds cause in your environment?

@spowell01- are you replicating only between windows servers? That's always worked fine for me, but trying to use robocopy to replicate from an SMB share on a mac server caused problems with syncing .mpkg files . . . .they either took days to complete, or never completed at all. sounds similar to what you're seeing.

[donmontalvo]

@nkalister Riverbed is great, wondered if OP did not have. We replicated to EMEA/APAC, having Riverbed made a huge difference.

[jarednichols]

@spowell01

Here's the robocopy command I'm using. Works a treat and only copies new or deletes old. Since you've got slow satellite links with high latency you may want to tweak the wait and retry (/w and /r) flags. We've got no slower than a 25M link and as fast as a 10G link between DPs so I've got them only set to 1 as the connections are fast and reliable.

It's recommended to setup your robocopy commands in a batch file (.bat) and call THAT with your scheduled task. That way if you need to tweak your robocopy command, you're just tweaking the batch file and not a scheduled task which can be a bit hard to slog through the way that the GUI is setup. Doing a "robocopy /?" at the cmd shell will give you all the flags you can use, and there are a lot of them. However it's pretty straightforward. One I'll draw your attention to as you're on slow satellite links is the /IPG flag. This is "inter-packet gap" and allows you to insert a wait (in ms) between packets to slow down your transfer so you don't take the full bandwidth of that connection.

robocopy.exe E:CasperShare \<Distribution Point Servername>caspershare /XF web.config /W:1 /R:1 /COPY:DAT /E /PURGE /LOG:E:RobocopyLogsRobocopy-<Site>.txt /V

[spowell01]

Thanks everyone, I feel like an idiot. When I had tried to re-run the batch file after a successful run, I hit the enter key with my cursor out of the powershell window. It had appeared to be running but I realized this morning that I hadn't actually started the command. It took all of 25 minutes to run again this morning including about 250 megs of new data to copy.

We do not have RiverBed tech, however I have heard good things about them before. Some of our rural sites have all of about 10-12 people including the students/staff and I'm not sure of the justifiability of something like RB for each small site.

And thanks for the flags Jared, I will definitely look into setting some of those.

[Pascal_Sherman]

Can anyone help me / advise how to configure the certificates on the Riverbed using JDS's over https? Were you using Client Certificate Support?