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?
What kind of failure are you looking to address? Data resiliency, availability, automatic failover, etc?
Automatic failover, basically should a VM lock up in a way that monitoring/HA failover isn’t triggered can another VM be picking up the slack.
If you are keen on Windows does DFS NameSpaces fit the bill?
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!
https://docs.gluster.org/en/main/Administrator-Guide/GlusterFS-Introduction/
I’ve heard good things about glusterfs.
Never used it tho, I just go with cephLooks like Gluster also requires 3 servers.
