What does "highly available" actually mean - do you have an quantifiable or non-functional statements to describe this? What is your budget? Any other constraints? What are your other requirements (beyond loosely defined "HA"?)
Cheers Ken From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Kish n Kepi Sent: Thursday, 15 January 2015 4:42 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [NTSysADM] Windows File Server High-Availability Hello All, My boss requested that I make our File Server highly available. We currently have a physical server running Windows 2012, with shares published using DFS. The server has large quantities of DAS, some of which are shared primarily for IT dept use, and is connected to an 8 TB SAN which has the main, most used, share. I know that I can go out and purchase another physical file server and connect it to the same SAN LUN and finish the requirement. Besides acting as a file server, this server also serves WSUS and WDS. However, I'm thinking that it may make more sense to create 2 VMs on 2 existing separate physical hosts and create a cluster . The question is how I'd attach the SAN LUN to the virtual cluster. Would I need to create a virtual disk on the SAN, attach it to the cluster and copy the contents of the shares into that virtual disk? The downside of a virtual disk is that once created, it's difficult to resize if necessary, and unwieldy to copy/move to a new SAN that we will certainly need to get eventually. Any input for either scenario welcome, and I certainly will embrance any new ideas of how to accomplish this task. Kish N Kepi
