Microsoft states that Windows Server 2003 R2 DFSR has the following replication limits:
- Each member server can be a member of up to 256 replication groups.
- Each replication group can contain up to 256 replicated folders.
- Each server can have up to 256 connections
- On each server, the number of replication groups multiplied by the number of replicated folders multiplied by the number of simultaneously active connections must be kept to 1024 or fewer.
- A replication group can contain up to 256 members.
- A volume can contain up to 8 million replicated files, and a server can contain up to 1 terabyte of replicated files.
- The maximum tested file size is 64 gigabytes.
On the other side, in Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2008, there is no longer a limit to the number of replication groups, replicated folders, connections, or replication group members.
Whatever Microsoft says, remember that there is not a hard limit on the number of files that can be replicated. DFS Replication maintains an internal database per volume for all metadata information. And, theoretically, the Jet database can grow to as large as 32 TB.
What’s more, DFS Replication has no restrictions on the size of files replicated. As long as the staging space is appropriately and DFS Replication does not hit any space issues, it can replicate any size of files.
So, it shoud be possible to exceed these limits and still get acceptable replication performance.