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Hyper-V with SMB share, SMB offline inpact RRS feed

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    If I have a Hyper-V farm running 2012 using a SMB share 2012, what will the impact of the SMB share going offline be ?

    Will the VM's keep running till the share comes up again ?

    Monday, February 4, 2013 12:01 PM

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    Hi,

    Can you provide a bit more information here if possible?  Are your VHD's for the VMs actually being stored on the SMB share or do you have a general SMB share that is not being used to store the VHDs on?

    If the VMs are being stored on the SMB share, then yes the VMs will indeed go offline as the VMs need constant read/write access to the storage.

    Robert Milner | Website: http://www.remilner.co.uk | Twitter: @robm82

    Monday, February 4, 2013 12:05 PM
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    Hi,

    I think I know what you are asking - you are asking if you can create a fault tolerant SMB share by using the Hyper-V Hosts instead of a using dedicated fault tolerant File Server?  You can, but Microsoft do not support a "Loopback" configuration - if you want to use a fault tolerant SMB share, then you need to use an Active/Active File Server.  In a development environment you are fine to use a Loopback configuration.

    Robert Milner | Website: http://www.remilner.co.uk | Twitter: @robm82

    Monday, February 4, 2013 1:09 PM

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    Hi,

    Can you provide a bit more information here if possible?  Are your VHD's for the VMs actually being stored on the SMB share or do you have a general SMB share that is not being used to store the VHDs on?

    If the VMs are being stored on the SMB share, then yes the VMs will indeed go offline as the VMs need constant read/write access to the storage.

    Robert Milner | Website: http://www.remilner.co.uk | Twitter: @robm82

    Monday, February 4, 2013 12:05 PM
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    Yes the idea was to store the VHD on the SMB.

    Is it possible to create a setup of Hyper-V using SMB share without beeing as depended on the SMB ?

    Could the SMB use storage on the Hyper-V servers ?

    My goal is to build a Hyper-V farm using SMB without having to cluster my SMB host if that is possible. 

    Monday, February 4, 2013 1:04 PM
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    Hi,

    I think I know what you are asking - you are asking if you can create a fault tolerant SMB share by using the Hyper-V Hosts instead of a using dedicated fault tolerant File Server?  You can, but Microsoft do not support a "Loopback" configuration - if you want to use a fault tolerant SMB share, then you need to use an Active/Active File Server.  In a development environment you are fine to use a Loopback configuration.

    Robert Milner | Website: http://www.remilner.co.uk | Twitter: @robm82

    Monday, February 4, 2013 1:09 PM
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    Super that answers my question. Thanks alot :)


    Monday, February 4, 2013 1:37 PM
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    Yes the idea was to store the VHD on the SMB.

    Is it possible to create a setup of Hyper-V using SMB share without beeing as depended on the SMB ?

    Could the SMB use storage on the Hyper-V servers ?

    My goal is to build a Hyper-V farm using SMB without having to cluster my SMB host if that is possible. 

    You can go both ways: 

    1) Scale-Out File Servers (Active/Active with some restrictions) on top of an HA storage (SAS JBOD, iSCSI or FC). See these links:

    http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831349.aspx

    http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831359.aspx

    2) Classic Active/Passive failover SMB share on top of an HA storage (the same as 1). See this link as a reference (skip StarWind configuration part assuming

    you already have fault tolerant SAN / DAS as a building block below SMB):

    http://www.starwindsoftware.com/configuring-ha-file-server-for-smb-nas

    Second approach has some benefits - you can keep both VHDs and generic content on SMB shares something you cannot do with SoFS (see picture below).

    StarWind iSCSI SAN & NAS

    • Proposed as answer by robm82 Monday, February 4, 2013 4:55 PM
    Monday, February 4, 2013 1:54 PM