Help with designing a new File Server

glenimp617

glenimp617

glenimp617

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30 Sep 2005
Posts
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Hi All,

I'm after some advice please.

My client has three file servers all Virtual living on HV 2012 R2. Each file server hosts a single share from a single logical volume. You can see my predicament!

SERVER1 - 4TB (VHDX)
SERVER 2 - 4TB (Pass-Thru SAN Disk)
SERVER 3 - 11TB (Pass-Thru SAN Disk)

Hosting that amount of data from a single logical volume creates issues. If that volume became corrupt, or unavailable time taken to restore would not meet SLA targets.

There is a Microsoft employee who addressed this issue by using mount points, but my view is that it's nat good practice in an enterprise environment.

The 11TB file share isn't actually too bad. The structure of the share can be split up across multiple volumes and re-shared out.

My main concern is with the first two 4TB volumes. The first is a home drive share, set by \\server\share\%username%

How on earth can I address this?

I'm reluctant to use storage pools and spaces as this does not address the issue.
 
This is a nightmare to be honest, and I thought in 2016 Microsoft would have offered a solution. The only thing I can come up with is this.....

New File Server containing 4 x 1TB disks. Each disk contains a share.

Disk1 - \\server\share1
Disk2 - \\server\share2
Disk3 - \\server\share3
Disk4 - \\server\share4

Split the Users OU into 4 and apply a GPO to each of the 4 OUs using the above shares. It won't be an even 25% split, but it's the only thing I can come up with.
 
Just as an FYI.
If you change the path of the home drives share and the users devices have offline files, they will need to be cleared as well. You might get data loss if the users have sync issues.

You could use DFS to keep the path the same, DFS-R to move the data around, sure it eats storage initially but you can get it back once both the new and old shares are sync'd.
 
Thanks everyone

Ended up spending the entire day designing an entirely new file structure

Going to build everything from scratch

SERVER1, 2, 3
2 x 2TB Volumes (Local SAN)
or perhaps 4 x 1TB

SERVER4 (Remote site)
2 x 2TB Volumes (Remote SAN)
or perhaps 4 x 1TB

Each server will host a departments documents

(eg: Marketing)
Public (Auth Users)
Private (Department Group)
Users (ABE)

DFSN will point to shares on all four servers (\\domain\staff)
Specific folders will be DFSR to remote site (SAN at remote site is much smaller than main site)
GPOs on each department OU to folder redirect my docs

Unfortunately there is not enough space to initially DFSR the old to new. We'll have to migrate a department at a time.

The upside

No volumes larger than 2tb
If one server fails, the company only loses access to whatever departments are held on that server, currently they lose all data
Users at remote site accessing data locally
If departments marked for DFSR lose access at the local site, they can access it at the remote site instead
Site to Site SAN replication wont be required for any LUNs hosting file server data. Cuts down on bandwidth during the night (Dell SANs)
 
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