FRS and Sysvol Improvements

  • Article

Group Policy benefits from improvements to the File Replication Service (FRS) and storage of the new administrative template files (ADMX files) to reduce usage of network bandwidth and Sysvol storage costs.

DFS Replication—the successor to FRS—is a new state-based, multimaster replication engine that supports replication scheduling and bandwidth throttling. DFS Replication uses a new compression algorithm that is known as Remote Differential Compression (RDC). Using RDC, DFS Replication replicates only the differences (or changes) between the two servers, resulting in lower bandwidth use during replication.

In earlier operating systems, whenever you created a Group Policy object (GPO), all the default Administrative Template files (ADM files) were added to the GPO. The storage cost was approximately 4 MB per GPO. Replication traffic would spike during events that caused all GPOs to be changed, such as modifying permissions on GPOs during an upgrade from a Windows 2000 domain to a Windows Server 2003 domain. This situation caused all ADM files across GPOs to replicate at once, which can impact network bandwidth availability and performance.

This process is replaced in Windows Vista with a central store on Sysvol, containing the new version of ADM files, known as ADMX files. Unlike earlier versions of Windows, GPOs created using Windows Vista do not each contain ADMX files. This change means less data replication over the more efficient DFS Replication Service.

As long as all Group Policy administrators use the Windows Vista client, new GPOs will not contain either ADM or ADMX files inside the GPO. The result of this change is a savings of about 4 MB per GPO. After the enterprise is updated to use the new DFS Service, the information that is contained in the GPO replicates, using the DFS Replication Service that only replicates the differences in the GPO. These two changes will greatly reduce the amount of storage and network bandwidth needed after the Group Policy administrator changes a GPO. For more information about improvements to ADM files and their storage, see New Format and Functionality of Administrative Template Files (ADMX).