Linux Samba shared storage under VMware

[bcredeur97]

Simple question:

Is it possible to have a 2 node Linux samba (SMB file server) cluster under Vmware ESXi, both sharing the same storage (virtual disks that live on SAN attached to VMware cluster)  so that you can perform maintenance and such on your file server whilst maintaining 24/7/365 availability for your clients?

Just an idea that came across my head for our file server at work lol

[Jarno.]

hi @bcredeur97

 

Interesting question actually. I won't know why it should not work. Do you mean that VMware should use this samba to store the virtual storage? (SAN solution) First thing that comes up to me is glusterfs with Samba not sure how you should set this up though. But in theory it can work.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Best way is probably with something like dfs namespaces, where you can have one path have multiple servers than can have fail over.

 

https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Distributed_File_System_(DFS)

Thats the wiki page for samba, I have done it on windows many times and it works fine, but haven't done it on samba yet.

 

 

[bcredeur97]

18 minutes ago, Jarno. said:

hi @bcredeur97

 

Interesting question actually. I won't know why it should not work. Do you mean that VMware should use this samba to store the virtual storage? (SAN solution) First thing that comes up to me is glusterfs with Samba not sure how you should set this up though. But in theory it can work.

basically you run a clustered file server as normal... except it's all under an existing vmware cluster that uses a SAN as it's storage provider.

so the 2 VM's share the same storage.. if one goes down the other one is there for failover so your clients see nothing. pretty simple concept.. just can't seem to find anything about it online so I asked here.

[bcredeur97]

18 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Best way is probably with something like dfs namespaces, where you can have one path have multiple servers than can have fail over.

 

https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Distributed_File_System_(DFS)

Thats the wiki page for samba, I have done it on windows many times and it works fine, but haven't done it on samba yet.

 

 

This sounds great... do you need double the storage essentially though? It sounds to me like each server would have it's own storage and that's basically "synced" to the other server, thus providing your failover.

 

but that would mean our 8TB file server would require 16TB. considering it's all on enterprise SSD's, the cost would be too ridiculous to consider just for failover. So that wouldn't work. This would be more for fail-over, not as a backup, for that we have a different solution.

What I want is 2 machines that share the same storage basically. It may not be possible, idk.

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 hour ago, bcredeur97 said:

This sounds great... do you need double the storage essentially though? It sounds to me like each server would have it's own storage and that's basically "synced" to the other server, thus providing your failover.

 

but that would mean our 8TB file server would require 16TB. considering it's all on enterprise SSD's, the cost would be too ridiculous to consider just for failover. So that wouldn't work. This would be more for fail-over, not as a backup, for that we have a different solution.

What I want is 2 machines that share the same storage basically. It may not be possible, idk.

well if the samba shares are on shared storage, then you can have one storage volume.

 

But if you want true failover you will need to servers in ha. I wouldn't have 2 vms running with samba with failover on one host, the downtime needed for samba is just low, and not worth the effort and extra clustering to fail.

 

[bcredeur97]

14 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

well if the samba shares are on shared storage, then you can have one storage volume.

 

But if you want true failover you will need to servers in ha. I wouldn't have 2 vms running with samba with failover on one host, the downtime needed for samba is just low, and not worth the effort and extra clustering to fail.

 

they wouldn't be on one host. theyd be seperated on the cluster, just using the same storage source. Backup/diaster recovery would be handled differently, this would be just to provide HA (maintenance could be performed on one file server while the other would still be up and running).

I don't think it's possible though. in ESXi, if you have VM's sharing storage you apparently lose the ability to move the VM's between hosts. So I think that pretty much kills that idea.

[GardeningWithSilicon]

https://communities.vmware.com/blogs/Abhilash_hb/2013/08/25/clustering-using-sharing-of-vmdks-between-virtual-machines