"NAS Configurator" Wizard

[ahelland]

One of the scenarios I want to address with my Starwind setup is having HA SMB shares for "plain" client access. (I will also leverage it for Hyper-V scenarios, and server loads, but that's a different topic.)

I've setup two virtual servers with Windows Server 2012 R2 and Failover Cluster, and will be adding the storage exposed by Starwind to this cluster. (StarWind is running on two physical boxes.)

Now, I can expose the SMB shares from these virtual boxes, and use this cluster as a "front-end" for the desktops to interface with and StarWind iSCSI back-end . Or I can run the "NAS configurator" on a Starwind host to achieve the same result, am I right?

I have read the pdf for "Configuring HA File Server for SMB NAS" for v6, which basically shows how to setup the Failover Cluster directly on the Starwind boxes.

Is this different in v8? I tried running through the wizard, but it complains that I haven't installed the Failover Cluster role, so I'm thinking it might be.

Is this a correct assumption on my part?

Are there any "extra" features the NAS configurator provides when combined with the StarWind cluster on the same box, or is it the same as running it through the separate File Servers I have (from a feature perspective, not performance)?

[anton (staff)]

Failover NAS is for file server workload **AND** some VM and SQL Server hosting (not good really). To store VMs it's better to configure Scale-Out File Servers with StarWind running as a block back end. In post-V8 we'll do SoFS automatic configuration as well (not sure about plain V8 release).