Hello,
We are soon going to deploy a server 2012 storage cluster with a fiber channel san as the backend disk. Our dilemma right now is that our file servers are getting to be too large and our VMDK disks in our Vsphere cluster and are limited to 2TB each (the storage volume can be 64tb, but that mean's making multiple disks to get an 8TB server). This is becoming an awkward size to manage and we(storage admin's) would like to shy away from it. Our server admin's think otherwise.
My question is this:
As pure file storage, wouldn't SMB3 have far more advantages over block based storage when utilizing server 2012 storage server?
For example. We would like to use snapshots (previous versions) for our client devices, as well as maybe using deduplication. If you are using block based storage and just have a vmdk placed on the disk, snapshots/previous versions wouldn't even work would it? Same goes for dedup. It wouldn't work very well because it can't really "see" the files inside the vmdk, like it could if you used SMB3.
Are there any other advantages of using server 2012 as a NAS instead of a SAN for pure file storage?
Thanks,
Dan.