New HyperV File Server - VHDs vs Shares

[smithson83]

Hi guys and gals,

 

I'm setting up a new Virtual File Server to take over from an aging Physical. At the moment, all the data is on one drive (D:), and (badly) split up into folders/shares etc.

 

At a previous school I've had two VHDs one for Pupils and one for Staff and had Homedrives and Pupil/StaffShares on each.

I was wondering what you guys do?

 

Do you have one big VHD (ours would be around 2TB, and carve it up just with folders and use FSRM to set Quotas and rules etc, or would you have separate VHDs, and if so, would you have a separate VHD as above, or go further one for each main share?

 

Approx Sizes

Staff Home - 540GB

Staff Share - 815GB

Pupil Home - 190GB

Pupil Share - 280GB

[snagrat]

I generally have one drive for everything.

 

I can't see why it would matter which way it was done really, except if the drives were on faster hardware

[smithson83]

They're all going to be on a CSV on the same SAN, I was thinking more of replication, backups, shadow copies etc, if either way would be better having less data per drive etc. if there was a point at which size became cumbersome for other aspects other than just the files/shares themselves.

[ColinP]

Im Planning on having the staff and student file servers seperated on diffrent vlans, should improve overall secuity and risk of infections

[smithson83]

Well, that's erm, definitely in the camp of "going further":D

[ZeroHour]

I would always have a system os partition and a file storage partition but thats just out of habbit, one benefit would be you can dupe the fs vhd and mount it on the next version of x os and try it out without having to copy all the files across etc.

[smithson83]

That's something I've not thought about @ZeroHour. Although I always have the data drive/partition separate, it hadn't occurred to me that it could be duplicated and used as a testing bed for the next server upgrade.

[smithson83]

OK, Secondary Question...

 

I've always used Fixed Disks for File server Data VHDs, is this still the way to go, or do you guys use dynamic disks for you file data?

[snagrat]

Fixed disks are quicker but take up more room

[XiJ]

OK, Secondary Question...

 

I've always used Fixed Disks for File server Data VHDs, is this still the way to go, or do you guys use dynamic disks for you file data?

 

I looked into this on my last sever build (for a primary school). I went dynamic - the speed issue once the old data was transferred isn't enough to make a difference. And it makes handing the data vhd's easier.