4.14. A Scale-Out File Server cluster is placed in front of the SAN, which provides
access to the SAN storage via SMB 3. This allows the investment in the SAN and its
capabilities to be leveraged by the entire datacenter without requiring all the hosts to
be connected directly to the SAN. To ensure best performance, have at least as many
CSV volumes as nodes in the cluster to allow the balancing to take place. Have double
or triple the number of CSV volumes for even better tuning. For example, if I have
four hosts in the SoFS cluster, I would want at least eight CSV volumes.
Figure 4.14 Using a Scale-Out File Server in front of a SAN
Another option if you do not have a SAN or don’t want to use it for certain workloads
is to leverage Storage Spaces as the backend storage. While it would be possible to
have a single server using Storage Spaces and hosting storage via SMB 3 to remote
hosts, this would be a poor design because it introduces a single point of failure. If the
SMB 3 server was unavailable, every workload hosted on the server would be
unavailable as well. Always leverage a file server cluster and use a clustered storage
space, which would have the disks stored in an external enclosure and be accessible to
all the nodes in the cluster that are connected. Ensure that resiliency is enabled for
the virtual disks created, most likely mirroring for best performance. This would look
like Figure 4.15.