Best practice setting up Windows 2008 file server on ESX 3.5 SAN storage

[pytrehau1000]

I wonder what's the best practice when setting up two new Windows 2008 file servers. The servers will be installed on a fiber connected SAN (Dell/EMC) and are supposed to both manage the same fileshare which is located on the same SAN.

[penghaug]

hi,

Why 2 file servers to access the same share? Are you going to use vmware with HA and possibly DRS. That is redundancy enough in my mind (if that's the reason for 2 servers?)

-Pål-André

[pytrehau1000]

Thanks for your reply,

yes we will use HA but the two servers will also be domain controllers and that's why we want two servers - for load balancing and redundancy. And for that reason should the fileshare be a so-called raw device mapping?

[Nick_F]

I'd just have separate VMs for the DCs, one of the advantages of virtualising is you consolidate the physical side but can still have granularity on the VM side. DCs sharing other roles is never a good idea anyway.

[penghaug]

hi,

I agree with Nick_F in his conclusion. We do not mix other roles with our DC's. (Some might probably disagree to that....)

-Pål-André

[Lightbulb]

I agree with the previous posts regards isolation of functions.

Another point, I assume by your post (Though I may be wrong) that you will be setting up the 2 2008 systems in a cluster with the RDM as a Cluster file share. You may want to verify that your SAN supports SCSI-3 persistent reservations if you will be clustering the 2008 systems as support is a requirement.

[pytrehau1000]

Thanks again for the replies,

I consider at to be an easy solution to set up another virtual Windows 2008 server dedicated to file sharing. Should I then just create a new virtual disk in VMWare for the datashare?

[Lightbulb]

A plain vmdk or RDM will do. Two things

1. If I/O is going to be heavy on this share you should consider the RAID level of the LUN that backs the VMFS datastore that the vmdk will reside on or that the RDM LUNs is provisioned from. For high I/O RAID 1+0 is your best bet. If you do not expect high I/O (Not a great number of concurrent reads and writes) than a vmdk on your existing datastore will do.

2. I am unsure of the support for clustering 2008 systems on ESX at this time (If that is what you intend). If you are looking for a way to setup just a fileshare and want to save some coin you could check out running Openfiler (http://www.openfiler.com/) as a VM. It can be integrated into AD and perform CIFS (Windows) sharing. Just a thought.