Summary
Is it possible to share a symlink to a network location as a Network Share in Windows? E.G:
D:\folder\Shared\foo
on \\server
is shared as \\server\foo
, where D:\folder\Shared\foo
is actually a directory symbolic link to \\other\server\bar
.
Or is this an XY Problem?
Background
We have a Windows Server 2008 R2* virtual machine, fs1
, with 2 virtual disks. C:
is of course the system drive and D:
is a data drive. We share multiple folders on D:
via SMB using Windows Share and Storage Management. For example:
D:\Shares\Shared\Engineering
is shared as\\fs1\Engineering
C:\Shares\Shared\Admin
is shared as\\fs1\Admin
These shares are typically mapped as network drives on user workstations. E:\
might be mapped to \\fs1\Engineering
, for example.
I want to move these shares off of this virtual disk and onto our new storage location \\abc\def
, and I want to do this transparently to the end user (at least for now - eventually the original path will go away but that's out of scope of the question).
*Upgrading to 2016 or 2019 this year.
Where I am Now
Certain subfolders of the shared folders are being migrated by first by copying the data to the target location (\\abc\def
) using RoboCopy, then renaming the original path to a backup path, and finally creating a directory symlink to the new target. The process looks roughly like so (some additional flags/options are omitted for brevity):
robocopy D:\Shares\Shared\Admin\Finance \\abc\def\Finance /mir
ren D:\Shares\Shared\Admin\Finance D:\Shares\Shared\Admin\Finance_old
mklink /D D:\Shares\Shared\Admin\Finance \\abc\def\Finance
Then the Finance_old
folder gets permissions changed and eventually deleted once we've verified that things are working well.
Note that the root shared folder,
D:\Shares\Shared\Admin
, is still an actual folder and not a symlink.
This works very well - it can be done with less than 1 second of downtime, and all end user programs continue to work.
Aside: Windows SymLink Permissions
I have already set up a GPO to allow
Remote Link to Remote Target
symbolic links. source1, source2
The Problem
There are too many subfolders to make symlinks for each one, so instead I'd like to make a single symlink for each shared root folder.
I can successfully create a symlink in the D:\Shares\Shared
directory:
mklink /D D:\Shares\Shared\symlink_test \\abc\def\target
I can then successfully add it to Share and Storage Management:
And the share shows up when browsing \\fs1
in Windows Explorer.
But when I try accessing the shared location \\fs1\symlink_test
, I get a "Device not ready" error:
Hey it says stuff about permissions!
I have checked all of the permissions, the location should be readable.
- I can access
\\abc\def\symlink_test
directly. - I can access
D:\Shares\Shared\symlink_test
and it correctly takes me to the target location.
So I don't think it's a permission issue.
Other Info
fs1
is running Windows Server 2008 R2\\abc\def
is actually a Distributed File System namespace\\abc\def\foo
is a folder in the DFS namespace with a target on a Synology NAS\\nas1\foo