How to share resources among several servers

Question

Hi, I have a few servers in a Hyper-V environment, Srv1, Srv2, Srv3, etc. All servers run Windows Deployment Server (WDS) and physical hardware /clients are PXE booting from these servers.
Srv1 Network: 10.1.1.1
Srv2 Network: 172.16.1.1
Srv3 Network: 192.168.1.1

All servers are configured with Hyper-V and the Network Switch type is "External" as clients need to boot from the WDS. Everything is fine at the moment but I am challenged to manage a shared storage /network drive that all servers can access. I mean if I configure shared storage for Srv1, Srv2, Srv3, etc. I have to copy the contents on multiple locations (the shared resources are the same for each server). What will be the optimized way to have one shared drive /network drive and all servers can access it (and still clients can PXE boot from the Servers).

Answer 1

Hello, Thank you for posting in Q&A forum. If you are using Windows Server, it's recommended to create a file server and enable the file sharing and manage the file share based on this server. Meanwhile, you can enable DFS role on the server, which allows you to group shared folders located on different servers into one or more logically structured namespaces. On each Hyper-V server, you'll need to connect to the file share by SMB connection and then map network drives on each server to the shared folders on the file server. REF: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/dfs-namespaces/dfs-overview Best Regards, Hania Lian

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Answer 2

A shared network folder (SMB) hosted on an external server or SAN/NAS, as mentioned above, is just one of the options, but requires you to have additional hardware for that purpose. You can also host such a network drive on one of the existing servers that have enough free storage, but such a configuration will get asymmetrical, meaning all the servers will depend on that one machine that hosts all the data.

A much better approach is to cluster your Hyper-V server using a shared-nothing approach where local storage becomes shared/synchronized between servers in real time, upgrading your entire environment to a highly available and fault-tolerant one. If you have Datacenter licensing, Storage Spaces Direct is what you need to achieve the above https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-stack/hci/concepts/storage-spaces-direct-overview. Alternatively, you can use a 3rd party solution called virtual SAN https://www.starwindsoftware.com/vsan that is suitable for Windows Server Standard and, unlike S2D, works reliably on 2 and 3-node configurations like yours.