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Let's say I have 4 servers in a "storage cluster", each of them has access to a JBOD of 24 hard drives. Then I have another 16 servers in a "VM cluster", running Hyper-V, each of them only has a boot disk. All of the servers are connected to a 10GbE switch.

S2D is set up on the "storage cluster", and the rest of the 16 servers have their VMs residing on the network share from the "storage cluster".

So I'm reading lots of information around various blogs, but I still can't figure it out: is there any real benefit of setting up SOFS on top of S2D?

Brane
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2 Answers2

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S2D is uber-expensive for what it does in terms of storage-only deployment. It's Datacenter-only WS feature so while HCI scenario kind of makes sense - segregated / SOFS definitely doesn't. I'd leave things AS IS. If you absolutely want SOFS for whatever reason - look @ StarWind VSAN Free. It's much faster, more reliable within 2-Node deployment and... it's free :)

NISMO1968
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If you don't set up SOFS, your file server (cluster) has a single point of failure. If one of the storage nodes dies, all the shares that it currently owns will fail over to another node, but all clients will be disconnected, which means that all of those VMs will crash. The share will come back, and the VMs will eventually restart, but this will be very disruptive.

With SOFS, a failure of a single node in the storage cluster might cause a slight stutter in the rate of I/O completion, but all requests made to the file server cluster will complete and the VMs will continue to run.

Jake Oshins
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