Scale Out File Server questions

[PnoT]

So I want to throw up a SOFS at home using a 24 bay c6100 with 2 nodes being Hyper-V hosts and the other 2 SOFS.

My equipment at the moment consists of:

C6100 24 bay with IB daughter cards
2x nodes - Hyper-V hosts with 1 local drive [5 bays free per node]
2x nodes - each node has the file server role and a local RAID10 (4x256GB Samsung Pro SSDs) attached to 9211-8i [1 bay free per node]
24 Port IB switch
9260-8i
Intel SR1680MV 2 node but no IB


I'd like optimize my storage and possibly build a shared JBOD to use as a target for the SOFS. I'm uncertain on what type of controller I'd need to use in order to make that happen. The local storage options on the C6100 are nice but I can't think of a way to present those to the 2 SOFS nodes as 1 array instead of 2 like it's setup now.

The 24 bay SuperMicro cases look appealing as I could throw in my 4TB backup drives into it and also the SSDs but I'm not sure that's the most efficient route to take.

Any advice is appreciated.

 

[PnoT]

Lots of views on this thread but no responses.

Is it because not many people are doing home SOFS or was my post too cryptic?

 

[markpower28]

Any external LSI HBA will be fine. LSI 9207-8e will be fine.

One thing you need to be aware is, if you plan to use JBOD for clusters, then you will need all SAS drives in the JBOD. SATA drive will not able to handle fail over from one node to other.

 

[PnoT]

Any external LSI HBA will be fine. LSI 9207-8e will be fine.

One thing you need to be aware is, if you plan to use JBOD for clusters, then you will need all SAS drives in the JBOD. SATA drive will not able to handle fail over from one node to other.

Why would SATA SSDs not be able to handle fail over?

How can I get the drives to show up to both servers with say a 9207-8e in them. As I understand it only 1 connection can be made into a port and that port connects to the drives in the external case. Maybe I'm just not visualizing this correctly.

Sorry but I'm really new to external SAS.

 

[markpower28]

SAS hardware allows multipath I/O to devices while SATA does not. So in file server cluster environment (what you try to do here), it's recommended to have SAS drive instead of SATA drive (ssd or not)

I have seen in Windows cluster environment cluster volume disappear because of SATA drive can't handle SCSI reservation.

 

[Chuntzu]

I have a scale out file server cluster set up and it only works with SAS drives. At one point I had 24 SAS ssds and 48 3tb sas hdds and it was very costly but works great. If you don't want to spend the money on SAS drives do a shared nothing cluster with server 10 preview.