Using CloudDrive + Drivepool for distributed filesystem

[stuart475898]

Hello,

 

I have recently been playing with a pair of microservers, and have put Server Core 2016 on them + Starwind Virtual SAN giving me a nice Hyper-V failover cluster. If testing this turns out well, I'd like to use it for both the home lab and normal home server. The issue is all of our films, TV series, files etc come in at around 8TB, which wont be part of the virtual SAN. This means that 4x 3TB disks I currently have will be distributed between the microservers. I'd like to continue to use Drivepool, and it looks like the best way to achieve what I want is to share out each individual hard disk, and add the lot into CloudDrive running on a highly available VM running Drivepool. I don't think I will want to use any features in CloudDrive such as pre-fetching or local caching; I only want the shares presented as physical disks for Drivepool.

 

What are everyone's thoughts on this? When one of the microservers is shutdown, the VM running Drivepool should failover and continue to provide a service. I take it CloudDrive will gracefully handle the shares going missing from the shutdown server?

 

I have included a diagram below to try and articulate what I am getting at better:

                                    ^
                                    | Drivepool shared via SMB
                                    |
                                    |
                          +---------+----------+
           +------------> |VM running Drivepool| <------------------+
  Each disk|SMB shared    |   and CloudDrive   |    Each disk SMB shared
           |     +------> |                    | <------------+     |
           |     |        +--------------------+              |     |
           |     |                                            |     |
           |     |                                            |     |
+--------------------+                             +--------------------+
| +---+  +---+ +---+ |                             | +---+  +---+ +---+ |
| |   |  |   | |   | |                             | |   |  |   | |   | |
| |   |  |   | |   | |                             | |   |  |   | |   | |
| |   |  |   | |   | |                             | |   |  |   | |   | |
| |SSD|  |HDD| |HDD| |                             | |SSD|  |HDD| |HDD| |
| |   |  |   | |   | |                             | |   |  |   | |   | |
| |   |  |   | |   | |                             | |   |  |   | |   | |
| |   |  |   | |   | |                             | |   |  |   | |   | |
| |   |  |   | |   | |                             | |   |  |   | |   | |
| +---+  +---+ +---+ |                             | +---+  +---+ +---+ |
+--------------------+                             +--------------------+
    |    Microserver        +-------------+            |    Microserver
    |                       | Virtual SAN |            |
    +---------------------> | CSV for VMs | <----------+
                            +-------------+

Hope that makes sense. Thanks for the help!

 

Stuart

[BinaryData]

I work for VMWare, so I'm not sure how your setup works complete, if this was ESXi VSAN I'd be able to help more.

 

At this point, the only way to know for sure is to try it. Monitor it the best you can. I have a 5 servers running our VSAN software, and another 5 running NSX. What you're wanting to do should work. Though, I think Cloud Drive might struggle a bit.

[stuart475898]

Thanks for the reply.

 

Thinking about it, you can more or less ignore the Virtual SAN bit actually - I am just asking can I present 4 normal file shares to a VM, have CloudDrive 'mount' them as a disk and then add them into Drivepool? Will CloudDrive/Drivepool gracefully handle losing 2 of the file shares in the event a host has to go down?

 

Stuart