Performance issue after moving ArcGIS Server config-store and directories

[tigerwoulds]

We recently transferred our ArcGIS Server site config-store and directories from one machine to a network DFS location and seeing some major performance issues. 

A bit about the architecture: Multi-tier ArcGIS Enterprise with 4 ArcGIS Servers participating in the site.

Till now, we had the config-store and directories pointed to a location on one of the machines; after reading this doc we decided to move both config-store and directories to a dfs location. The ArcGIS Server account has full permissions here.

You might choose to put the configuration store on a machine or disk that is not dependent on the ArcGIS Server, such as a fault-tolerant file server. 

After doing so, server manager is very slow to come up (~10-15 minutes to bring up services pane). 95% of services, maps, apps etc are functional but administering services is now impossible. 

Today I came access this esri doc where it says DFS is not supported. 

Choose a storage device that enables files to be read immediately from any node in your site once an operation and corresponding write has completed. This disqualifies many types of distributed file systems, such as GFS and DFS.

NFS shares must be configured to ensure consistent reads and avoid using stale data caches.

Is DFS not a fault tolerant file share? Do I need to request something different from my IT. Thanks in advance. 

[MarcoBoeringa]

From what I read in the links you posted, fault tolerance is not the issue with the performance of administering services. Fault tolerance just means stuff doesn't get lost in case of a failure of a single disk or server, e.g. by having a RAID that stores backup copies of any file, or a secondary server storing a backup. It doesn't say anything about the performance of the underlying file system.

Your problem is already pointed out by the text you quoted: apparently DFS will not immediately show any changes / writes to it to all machines accessing it, which appears to be required for properly managing your ArcGIS Server installation. This delay caused by DFS makes it unsuitable for storing your configuration store.

Based on the remarks of random high IO requirements in the links you posted, you're probably best off putting it on a (dedicated) single server with an NVMe drives based RAID 1 or 5 to have backup of the data. Modern NVMe drives should give you the required random IO performance.