Why I’m dabbling in this is a very long story, but lets assume I only have 2 servers at my disposal and want Windows Server VMs providing SMB shares without a single point of failure. Proxmox and HyperV are my options for hypervisors.
Ceph is out for a few reasons, most notably only having 2 servers, 1Gb networking and the Windows Server VM would still be a single point of failure. I’ve been reading up on Windows Storage Spaces and if I’m understanding correctly it seems I could cluster 2 physical or virtual servers, replicate the data between the 2 and present the SMB share as the cluster name/IP rather than individual servers.
Before I spend too much time setting up Windows clusters, are there any other options I should be looking into?
My understanding is that allows one server to present storage from multiple ‘back end’ servers, thus still being a single point of failure, right?
Maybe, it could be separate shares on separate servers presented as a single ‘host’ by a Windows cluster, this would be more storage efficient than replication and the only single point of failure would be any given back end server that would only affect 1-2 shared folders rather than all of them, which might be acceptable. Or I could be way the hell off with my understanding of DFS…
Edit: Did a bit more research, it seems DFS does do a redundant namespace that can handle failover. That might actually be exactly what I need. Thanks!