One way of achieving high availability is running multiple instances of Royal Server and configuring a shared folder as a Document Store folder. This way all running installations of Royal Server will work on the same set of documents.


Note: Royal Server is serialising all access to these documents and will merge concurrent changes correctly. This only works though when only Royal Server instances are working with these files, no "outside" access is allowed in this scenario (e.g. using Royal TS to load such documents directly or copying around .rtsz files manually or via scripts)


Note: The following instructions assume that both the Royal Server computer and the computer hosting the network share are members of the same Windows domain.


There are a few things to consider in order to configure the Document Store on a network share


On the machine running Royal Server

The worker account has to be a domain user (no domain administrator is needed) and should be a member of the following Windows groups "Royal Server Administrators", "Royal Server Users".


On the computer hosting the network share

The share must have read/change permissions for the Royal Server Worker Account. To do this, right click on the directory -> "Properties" -> "Sharing" -> "Advanced settings" -> "Permissions" -> give the Worker account read/change permissions.


Depending on your system, it may also be necessary to run the Royal Server Windows service with the Worker account. To do this, run "services.msc" -> select the "Royal Server" service -> right click -> "Properties" -> select the "Logon" tab -> change "Local system account" to "This account:" and enter the worker account.


Also, Windows uses caching when accessing shares. To be on the safe side, reboot Royal Server as well as the network share machine after any changes to be sure to see the current configuration at runtime.


Note:

If you configure a Documents folder that is not accessible from Royal Server, Royal Server will actually stop starting as this is an important part of Royal Server. You won't even see details in the log as Royal Server will encounter this error very early in the startup process. However, you will see a log entry in the Windows Log: "Event Viewer" -> Windows Logs" -> "Application". There you will find an entry that looks like this: 

Royal Server Host terminated unexpectedly: System.IO.DirectoryNotFoundException: 
Could not find a part of the path: 
<document-store-path>