Network Storage Configuration

[tmcd35]

Hi,

 

I'm getting a bit of a headache trying to work out the best setup for our network storage system and what to purchase to add some redundancy. I wonder if you guys had some thoughts or ideas I haven't explored yet...

 

 

Current Set Up

 

3x Hyper-V Host Servers connected to a 4.5Tb Storage Server using 16x450Gb SAS drives (RAID-50, hot spares, etc). The storage is currently provided using SMBv2 shares on Server 2008R2.

 

 

Proposed Set Up

 

I'm thinking of a second 16-bay server. Increase the capacity of both old and new severs to around 8Tb each using a mixture of either 900Gb or 600Gb SAS and some of the existing 450Gb SAS drives. Looking to move to Server 2012R2 Standard (the Hyper-V hosts are running Server 2012 Data Center). Thinking of using iSCSI instead of SMB shares. Thinking of Windows Storage Pools instead of hardware RAID. Not sure how Cluster Shared Volumes fits into all of this.

 

 

The Headache

 

How do I best make use of the old server? I don't want to decommission it. I'd like some level of failover redundancy, currently everything hangs off the old storage server. Ideally I'd like to replicate data between the two storage servers. Can't see the wood for the trees, what would be the best way of doing this - if at all possible?

 

We have thought of using SMBv3 instead of iSCSI and DFRS. That will work for our shared user folders, but Hyper-V can't use a DFRS share to store VHD images.

 

 

Any advice or pointers greatly appreciated.