Home share separate volumes / vhdxs?

[ADMaster]

Hello all,

What is the thought on separate staff and student home shares on to different drives? Here is a bit of my back story on the file server.

Back on 2003/2008 I had all the shares on the same drive and that made the old style of quotas difficult to have staff and student set a different levels. Between the new way of doing quotas and not really using them, anymore that’s not an issue.

When I virtualized the server onto 2012 I setup separate vhdxs for staff and students. This has worked fairly well but I’ve run into some growth issues.

We have digital art classes and recently introduced video editing into that. I have the raw space, I just expanded the students vhdx file.

The home area of the digital art teacher has grown to over 100GB. If I had staff and students on the same volume, I could take advantage of data deduplication. I’d guess most of the pictures and videos they have are copies of the student projects.

 

To address the space issue now I cam simply expand the staff vhdx file, but I’d also like to move to 2016.

Here are a few ideas I have for going forward.

In place upgrade and retain the separation.

In place upgrade and migrate data to single volume.

New VM and attach existing data vhdx files to it.

New VM and migrate the data.

 

Are there any security concerns with having staff and student data on the same volume provided the permissions are set correctly? Do you think the benefits of deduplication outweigh potential security concerns?

Anything obvious I’m overlooking?

I think I’m overthinking this one.

 

Thank you

[ADMaster]

bump

bump

[HBPS]

i used to have 2 staff and 2 student servers set with cluster manager in my previous Vmware environment worked fine for me for 3 years. id attach the vhd's to new servers seems pretty straight forward

[ITGURU]

All our school data is split per physical server, rather than array.

 

I have 7,8,9's on 1 server (Quotas), 10 and 11's on another (quota), then then students shared drives are on another (no quota) so in the event of any failure of a server, students can save elsewhere , touch wood never needed to do though.

 

Staff data is then on another server, no quotas.

[ADMaster]

Thanks, the job is done now.

I setup a new 2016 VM and created a new VHDX for user data, it needed expanded anyway. I then used robocopy to get the data on to it, setup the shares, then changed the path in DFS. No one noticed the change at all.

 

Then for the vhdx that contains my install shares etc. I shut down the old server, attached the vhdx to the new one.

On the new server I brought it online, setup the shares, and changed the DFS path.

 

That worked great too.