Paid_Peanuts Posted March 9, 2020 Posted March 9, 2020 (edited) Just looking to refresh our infrastructure kit and therefore VM's etc. Putting aside the whole on-prem vs cloud debate, how many file servers do you have onsite? Currently we have 4 which host home drive shares plus other network shares. Am looking at simplifying this onto one VM, with multiple drives within. Can anyone see any issues with this? If we were to put this into Azure, we wouldn't necessarily pay for multiple VM's to host simple shares. From a monetary perspective when it comes to Azure surely you'd look to rationalise and spin up as few VM's as possible? Why not apply the same logic to on-prem? Edited March 9, 2020 by Paid_Peanuts
synaesthesia Posted March 9, 2020 Posted March 9, 2020 Yeah, looking at the same - we have 3 (one for each of our sites although on one network and one for general app shares). With 10gb uplinks and SSD storage it seems a little wasteful so will be dropping the 3rd.
robyholmes Posted March 9, 2020 Posted March 9, 2020 We have two physical file server here but that's just because that's mainly as we have the hardware to do it. Running the file server in a VM is a good idea but you just need to plan out you virtual disk drives as there likely to be large. Maybe split them up to avoid having to deal with large single disks. As for if you would run two VMs, it really comes down to a risk assessment. With your VM hosted on high available hosts to protect against hardware failure your only remining risk is the file server OS itself. However if you can recover the OS quickly from a backup then a single server shouldn't be a problem.
Arthur Posted March 9, 2020 Posted March 9, 2020 Two virtual file servers here. One for students and the other for staff. This was done mainly to enable us to put the staff file server on a different VLAN to the student file server.
jthompson Posted March 9, 2020 Posted March 9, 2020 Working in this at the moment here, going from all file shares on single physical server to using a couple of VMs. The plan is one VM for individual home folders and another for the various shared drives we have. My main reason for splitting across two VMs is that being file servers, they'll be large, and I may need to spread the backup storage, so having it as two VMs will help in that regard.
CHiLL Posted March 9, 2020 Posted March 9, 2020 We have two dedicated virtual file servers, one for staff and one for students. Our other file storage is part of the SCCM server, for it's software deployment setup files and such.
localzuk Posted March 9, 2020 Posted March 9, 2020 We have 2 VM servers for our Trust's files. 1 hosts home drives, desktops, application data etc... The other hosts shared drives. We have 2 physical devices storing the data - 2 QNAP applicances with VMs stored on them via iSCSI.
mrbios Posted March 9, 2020 Posted March 9, 2020 One, only way i'd personally bother with two is if i was setting them up in a failover cluster, but that would require quite a large change to how it's configured, how the storage is presented to the VM and how backups operated. Can't really see much value in splitting the workload to be honest.
dmj Posted March 9, 2020 Posted March 9, 2020 We also do a failover cluster to centralised SAN - I'm not sure why you would setup more than one fileserver unless you were doing this (are they on different domains or something?).If you're not using a load balancer, the config for round robin DNS is really straightforward.
DrCheese Posted March 9, 2020 Posted March 9, 2020 1 for Students & Staff, including all home directories/shared areas 1 for Movies/videos - This runs a squash script each night to re-encode the videos into a better format than whatever they get uploaded as. Video files are blocked on the other file server I did this a few years ago after a major corruption issue with Windows Dedupe. I was tearing my hair out at watching veeam spend most of it's life restoring video files that I didn't really want! That and I got fed up of extending storage requirements just so people could horde videos from years ago.
3s-gtech Posted March 9, 2020 Posted March 9, 2020 We have six. Shares x3 in DFS-R, staff, students, then another which is staff and students together. Was all done for resilience and speed, which they do well, but it's a complex and bulky system.
supportman Posted March 9, 2020 Posted March 9, 2020 We have 1 primary file server with all school data on, which is replicated to a backup server. We also backup using veeam to the cloud cloud each night. All are VM's on local SSD storage.
KevinB Posted March 9, 2020 Posted March 9, 2020 We currently have two; one for user accounts and one for shared storage for staff, a media drive, and a place for our reprographics team to store their files.
TechMonkey Posted March 9, 2020 Posted March 9, 2020 Back in the day we had 3, one staff, one Student, one shared. If you were thinking of moving them to the Azure cloud would you not just use OneDrive and Sharepoint? So have no file servers?
msi_school Posted March 9, 2020 Posted March 9, 2020 We do two here one for user areas and one for shared areas, at my last place we did two, one for staff one for pupils. The latter was a better system because I could get down time on the pupil server quite easily. The reason for the split at both schools has been to make the back ups smaller.
psydii Posted March 9, 2020 Posted March 9, 2020 We have 5 VMs serving up data shares for our 1900 users, with with 18Tb storage between them. One server could easily handle the actual load (numbers of clients, number of open files, data transfer rates etc). However consider how long it would take to restore an entire 18Tb server, and how much you would lose if that turned out to be the day that your restore was damaged? So we split ours into logical groups trying to keep the size of each fairly equal. Each one is backed up independently to disk and tape. Of course there are scenarios where we'd need to restore all of them, but for those scenarios where only a single server needed to be restored, we can do that inside of 24hrs. That said, we have now mostly moved to SharePoint and OneDrive, so we have an undeterminable number of servers spread across (I think) three locations.
mavhc Posted March 9, 2020 Posted March 9, 2020 1 if your backup system can cope with backing it up better than what seems to be the standard. No reason you can't have multiple disks that are backed up separately. Seems like there 2 kinds of backup are being talked about, the OS running the file server, which is minimal. And the user files. Do they have to be in the same backup? 2 servers if they're replicated so you don't need to do a total restore, and your backup then is just "I deleted all my files 3 months ago and didn't tell anyone until today" in which case it can be on slow cheap media
jthompson Posted March 9, 2020 Posted March 9, 2020 Using Veeam for our backups. Fairly new to it but I can't see that I'd be able to back up a VM's disks (vhdx files on a SAN) independently of the VM as a whole (i.e. the OS and all the mounted vhdx files together as one job). Where I used to be able to pick and choose which folders to include in a particular backup job, I'm now just having to take entire VMs. That's why I've not put all file shares on one VM.
mrbios Posted March 9, 2020 Posted March 9, 2020 Using Veeam for our backups. Fairly new to it but I can't see that I'd be able to back up a VM's disks (vhdx files on a SAN) independently of the VM as a whole (i.e. the OS and all the mounted vhdx files together as one job). Where I used to be able to pick and choose which folders to include in a particular backup job, I'm now just having to take entire VMs. That's why I've not put all file shares on one VM. You can include and exclude disks within the job settings for the VM. You can create multiple jobs for the same VM and then select separate disks in each job if you wanted to split them. My file server has 3 disks. One with all the home folders on, one for shares, and one for the photography department/drama videos. So in theory i could do 3 backup jobs for the same VM, and only backup one disk per backup job for example. 1
mavhc Posted March 9, 2020 Posted March 9, 2020 Do you backup the VM, or the files in the VM? I'd separate out the 2, backup the whole VM for the OS part, but the files themselves for the user data, unless you're using ZFS on both ends, then it's easy anyway.
DrCheese Posted March 9, 2020 Posted March 9, 2020 but the files themselves for the user data Why tho? If you're doing it right your user data is on a seperate virtual disk anyway. If you did veeam's file backup option from within the VM you'd miss out on all the useful features like REFS fast clone.
jthompson Posted March 10, 2020 Posted March 10, 2020 Veeam only seems to allow a flat schedule (so n x daily). Now that I can see that disks can be excluded from Veeam backup jobs, I might consider going back to using BackupAssist for the user files, which has nicer scheduling options (quarter, month, week, day) without having to duplicate jobs.
TechMonkey Posted March 10, 2020 Posted March 10, 2020 You can do GFS with Veeam, if that is what you are after. https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/vsphere/backup_copy_gfs.html?ver=100 1
mavhc Posted March 10, 2020 Posted March 10, 2020 Why tho? If you're doing it right your user data is on a seperate virtual disk anyway. If you did veeam's file backup option from within the VM you'd miss out on all the useful features like REFS fast clone. Why would fast clone not work?
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