Possible to host a Windows Share on a vSAN Cluster

[mcbrowneps]

We recently purchased a VxRail cluster running VMWare/vSAN. For all of our Windows clients we redirect all documents and desktop folders to a share that is hosted on a 2 node Windows Failover Cluster. I wanted to know if there was anyway to host the actual share directly on the VxRail/vSAN cluster. Since the VxRail/vSAN is already configured with multiple levels of failover I just don't see the need to set up a Windows Failover Cluster. I will still need to set ntfs permissions on user folders within the share. Is it at all possible to set up a share directly on the vSAN cluster that can have ntfs permissions applied to it?

[daphnissov]

It can't be set up directly on vSAN because it doesn't offer file services, but you could provision a Windows VM and a separate drive which consumes storage from vSAN and share it out that way.

[mcbrowneps]

Only thing is, because this share will be for user files, I didn't want the drive to be directly linked to one VM in case I need to restart the VM or the VM becomes corrupt or something of that nature.  Is there anyway to get the drive to act like a NAS?  and then I can use DFS point to the storage/share?

[daphnissov]

Since vSAN doesn't offer native file services, if you wanted to provide file services on vSAN it has to be done as part of a VM in some shape or fashion. Otherwise, you would have to create an iSCSI target on vSAN and mount it from a physical machine(s). vSAN doesn't support consuming those iSCSI targets by vSphere machines (or other VMs for that matter).

[mcbrowneps]

Is it at all possible to setup two Windows VMs in a WSFC that share access to storage on the vSAN? 

[daphnissov]

SQL AAGs are, but not shared disks on vSAN.

[TheBobkin]

Hello mcbrowneps,

As far as I am aware only AO-AG with non-shared disks is supported:

"Microsoft Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) is supported with VMware vSAN version 6.1 and later for SQL Server Always On AG (non-shared storage)."

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2147661

Bob

[mcbrowneps]

So is my only option to set up a single Windows file server and attach storage from the vSAN pool to that VM?  Could storage spaces be an option to get some kind of redundancy on the Windows side of things?

[srodenburg]

"Could storage spaces be an option to get some kind of redundancy on the Windows side of things?"

In theory yes. It would protect against a failure with the VMDK housing the files. But I think it's overly complicated to be honest. In my long experience with VMware, I yet have to see a VMDK that just goes "POOF" by itself. If anything does say goodbye, it's mostly the NTFS filesystem which Storage-spaces does not protect against. A combination of Storage Spaces and REFS has a better chance of surviving filesystem errors and VMDK issues. REFS has a lot of self-healing logic that NTFS lacks. It's rather similar to ZFS in that respect.

Forget about Windows Clustering. It's junk. Always has been. The times that a cluster-node did not take over from the other... I lost count...

To answer your original question:  vSAN / ESXi is not a NAS.

Don't forget that a NAS also has a filesystem laid out over the disks (often EXT4 or ZFS) and despite RAID or Soft-RAID, if the filesystem goes corrupt, it's goodbye no matter how much hardware you throw against it.

[mcbrowneps]

Gotcha.  So sounds like I should stop over thinking this and set up one Server 2016 file server VM and add some Virtual Disks to the VM and call it a day. Does that sound right?

[virtualg_uk]

That is what I would do.

If you want "overkill" then take a look at this video from VMworld last year STO9423 - File Services on Virtual SAN

[hkg2581]

@mcbrowneps

I suggest you can setup a location VM replication within the same vSAN datastore using vsphere-replication appliance by keeping 3 or more instances of snapshot . So if you encounter a problem at the Guest level (ex: OS corruption), you can recover an older version of this VM from VR and use it again .

Another suggestion is to keep your OS and File share on two different VMDKs (drives within your guest) and donot mix them , doing this if your OS is courrpt you may attach your file-share VMDK to a different Windows box running same flavor/release you should still be able to get back your data . Thirdly take backups backups are important .

vSAN being an Object based storage , doesn't support hosting any NFS/CIFS share naively , however supports creating and export iSCSI targets from vSAN , which I believe you can present it to two different VMs using scsi bus sahre or something . I have never tried this before .

Regards,

Hareesh K G

(Blog : virtuallysensei.com )