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HendersonD
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Virtualized Windows file server ?

We are currently using a 5 year old Netapp FAS3020 for all of our storage needs:

  • About 2.5TB for 32 virtualized Windows servers including Exhcange, SQL, DC, etc.
  • About 2.5TB for file/folder shares. We have about 350 faculty and 2,000 students who have home directories and various shared directories

The advantage of the Netapp is it is unified storage doing both SAN and NAS. We will be purchasing new storage to handles our vSphere environment along with doing some VDI with VMWare View. Several of the options we are looking at are SAN only boxes. If we purchase one of these it leaves me two choices for how to handle file shares:

  • Purchase a different box just for file sharing, something like a BlueArc, Tegile, or Nexsan. This would split our centralized storage into two different platforms that each have to be managed
  • Run a Windows file server to front end things

A few questions about running Windows file service under Windows Server 2008 R2

  1. How well does this work? Would I need more than one Windows file server to handle the load?
  2. How stable is this setup? My Netapp CIFS/SMB shares have been bulletproof for 5 years, never going down
  3. Has anyone ever seen or tried this solution:
    http://www.sanbolic.com/sharecenter.htm
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weinstein5
Immortal
Immortal

There is no issue running a virtual file server - to address concerns:

  • Performance - insure tehre is enough network bandwidth to support access - you can gauge by looking at how the current NetApp is configured - as well as the IO throught put to you SAN - 
  • Availability - this is really  going to reaally on a number of things - reduundancy built into the SAN infrastructure and network, and employ HA in VMware environment
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HendersonD
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

I have a 2GB connection to the Netapp and it seems to be working fine. My new setup will have 10GB at the core so I certainly will not be saturating my network connection. Any idea how many windows file servers I need?

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schepp
Leadership
Leadership

HendersonD wrote:

Any idea how many windows file servers I need?

Depends on your concurrent users and what kind of files you will store there, like big roaming profiles.

What do you expect to be the bottle neck? Disk latency?

I'm running some windows file servers with 4-10TB storage each for about 350 users without any problems. But as I said, it depends.

Regards

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HendersonD
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

I guess I am just having a hard time comparing an applianced based file sharing solution like the Netapp filer to a server based solution. Here are my thoughts:

  • Processing power - I would be running a virtualized Windows file server on brand new ESXi hosts. These hosts have the new Intel E5-2600 (Sandy Bridge) processors which are far faster than whatever 5 year old processor is in the Netapp FAS3020
  • RAM - same goes here, my new servers have plenty of memory
  • Networking - whether I go with a virtualized Windows file server or another appliance based solution, either one will be connect via 10GB ethernet so this will not be a bottleneck
  • Disk - the new SAN solutions I am looking at are either all flash/SSD based (Whiptail, Pure Storage) or a hybrid (Tegile, Nexsan, Nimble) so they will provide more IOPS with lower latency than my current Netapp solution which uses SATA disk shelves for CIFS shares

I restarted my filers a total of 3 times across 5 years and since they are a clustered pair, services never went down. I will certainly have to restart a Windows file server more than that just to keep up with Windows updates. Three more questions:

  • Should I run at least two file servers in a cluster to provide higher availabilty? Any gotchas in this setup?
  • Given that I have 400 staff and nearly 2,000 students using file services should we have even more than 2 file servers?
  • Does Windows file service have the ability to do quotas? Right now we give staff a 10GB quota and students 1GB. I would like to double both of these. Much of what is stored is office files (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) along with larger files from the Adobe CS suite and Autodesk products. No roaming profiles.
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sparrowangelste
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

  • Should I run at least two file servers in a cluster to provide higher availabilty? Any gotchas in this setup?

If you run it in a cluster you would need to do raw mappings for MSCS. (microsoft cluster service). You can run up to 2 iirc, for best practice. I've run MSCS clustered files services for years on two servers that were virtualzied. it makes doing updates easier.

  • Given that I have 400 staff and nearly 2,000 students using file services should we have even more than 2 file servers?

Im not sure that you can have more than two.

  • Does  Windows file service have the ability to do quotas? Right now we give  staff a 10GB quota and students 1GB. I would like to double both of  these. Much of what is stored is office files (Word, Excel, Powerpoint)  along with larger files from the Adobe CS suite and Autodesk products.  No roaming profiles

to do quoatas you would have to enable it on the volume in windows.

--------------------- Sparrowangelstechnology : Vmware lover http://sparrowangelstechnology.blogspot.com
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