3 servers, 18 HDDs, how to setup?

[suchamoneypit]

I have 3 servers, each running Windows Server 2016 Datacenter. Each has 6 HDDs, 10K SAS drives, 146GB each. 

 

My question is what are some possibilities for configuring this space? I originally thought about speed, but instead I think I might be interested in instead focusing on data redundancy. I have a goal, lets say make a combined ~900GB drive on each server, then have 2 of the others servers copy the data from a master server? This would Mean I store data on one server which will have around 900GB of space available, and then the other 2 servers would mirror this data for triple redundancy. Another question would be to instead set up a RAID array, in which I have ~450GB of storage in RAID, which is doubled in speed, and then mirrored on the other servers for 450GB of fast, triple redundant storage. I completely open to suggestions for different setups. I think redundancy is a requirement whatever the setup though as I may store extremely old family photos which are priceless and losing digital copies I'd spend a lot of time making would be devastating.

 

Can any point me in the direction I need to go to configure such a setup? Help and suggestions much appreciated, I really do appreciate people taking the time out of their day to provide me help.

[Mikensan]

What you're looking for is "clustered" storage. I've never done this with windows personally but here is something I found:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/clustering/2012/06/02/how-to-configure-a-clustered-storage-space-in-windows-server-2012/

 

You could also look at GlusterFS or Cephs - will take a little bit of elbow grease.

 

Also you won't get 900gb per server, closer to 750ish. Less if you plan to at least have a single drive fault tolerance (raid 5 etc...). If this is a lab then sure stripe them but even in a cluster i'd still want each node to have some fault tolerance if it's going to run longer than a month. Save yourself the hassle of repairing your cluster because a single disk took out the entire node.

[Jarsky]

If you want to use VMWare, you can set them up in a cluster and configure the storage as a pool using vSAN. It's VMware's virtual SAN product which allows you to utilise the storage of you ESXi hosts to create a virtual SAN. Just keep in mind, depending how you configure it, you'll always need at least 2 hosts powered on. 

 

Otherwise yeah, you can use something like GlusterFS to create clustered storage. 

[Salv8 (sam)]

1 hour ago, Mikensan said:

What you're looking for is "clustered" storage. I've never done this with windows personally but here is something I found:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/clustering/2012/06/02/how-to-configure-a-clustered-storage-space-in-windows-server-2012/

clustered windows servers are really meant for data center stuff and from memory need to be on a windows domain and need to also have a separate windows domain server so that they can work, but not sure about so don't quote me on that....

Quote

clustered windows servers are really meant for data center stuff and from memory need to be on a windows domain and need to also have a separate windows domain server so that they can work, but not sure about so don't quote me on that....

god fucking damit...

[leadeater]

If you want to stick with Windows then Storage Spaces Direct is what you're after, that'll distribute the data across the 3 servers in a single name space like Gluster and Ceph do.