We are currently using a 5 year old Netapp FAS3020 for all of our storage needs:
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:
A few questions about running Windows file service under Windows Server 2008 R2
There is no issue running a virtual file server - to address concerns:
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?
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
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:
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:
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.
Im not sure that you can have more than two.
to do quoatas you would have to enable it on the volume in windows.