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James Edmonds
Asked: 2016-08-10 03:17:37 +0800 CST

How can I create shared disks for Windows SoFS VMs in VMware?

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I am looking to move our DFS-R file servers to SoFS to accommodate our User Profile Disks in Windows Server 2012 R2 remote desktop services.

DFS-R does not give us any fail over capability as it stands, so if we lose the primary file server, user's profiles will become dismounted.

I intend to create two nodes as VMs in VMware, and need a solution for the shared storage. Our VMware cluster has datastores on our SAN, so I am wondering if I can just use shared VMDKs at VMware level for this kind of scenario? If this is possible, can anyone point me in the direction of a good set of instructions on how to configure shared storage in this way?

Are there any dos/don'ts for shared storage in this scenario?

Has anyone created a SoFS setup on VMware before and have any advice that may be of use?

virtual-machines cluster vmware-esxi failover file-server

2 Answers

  1. Even taking into account an upcoming "VHD Set" feature in Windows Server 2016, you would still need some shared storage to store VHDs. Try StarWind Virtual SAN or HP VSA, they both can present local disks on each server as a shared HA Datastore.

    From my personal experience, configuring "guest SoFS" may be a pain in the neck in comparison to "hardware SoFS" due to the combination of fail-over algorithms of MS Failover Cluster and vSphere HA Cluster kicking-in at the same time. But it definitely CAN be deployed with some efforts.

    Here is a nice guidance describing SoFS deployment on top of the StarWind storage: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/technical_papers/Hyper-V2012_dedicated_iSCSI.pdf

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  2. According to VMware (I couldn't quite make sense of their documentation, so opened a support case directly), VMDKs in VMFS datastores are not supported, and we have to use RDMs.

    Issue for us is no available storage to dedicate for RDMs, as it has already all been used for VMFS datastores.

    Sounds like RDMs will allow us to achieve what we need though.

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