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Clustered Hyper-V on NetApp, SMB3?

I have 4 clustered 2012 R2 Hyper-V Hosts in which the Clustered Share Volumes are stored on a NetApp FAS2220 running 8.2.3 7-Mode. On the NetApp I have created a Volume and then created a LUN within that Volume and mapped the LUN via iSCSI to the Hosts. Is this the best way to have this set up? I hear a lot about SMB3 and am just wondering if there's a better way to set this up that might have advantages over the current setup. It is in production so any changes would have to be done with minimal or no downtime, however there is more than enough available storage on the NetApp to duplicate my current Hyper-V footprint and Live Migrate VMs if needed. Thoughts, Ideas?

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Paul MacDonald

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Rick Goodman

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Great read Paul. I'm going to leave this open a bit just to see what others say. Do you use either in your environment? And do you know if the only real way to use SMB3 as a CSV is to build a scale out file server? Or is it possible to just create a qtree and then a CIFS share from that and use that for a CSV? I might just try and create a CSV from SMB and move a few non-critical VMs to it and see how it goes.

Paul MacDonald

I use iSCSI, having converted from FiberChannel several years ago. I'm quite happy with iSCSI - and use it for CSVs as well - but I don't have an even perspective.

Note that there's no explanation for the difference in performance in that analysis. That's why I said take it for what it is.

Rick Goodman

ASKER

Yeah, I see that. I'm getting ready to move to VEEAM for backups and before I set it all up I'm just going through and doing some clean up and thought if I'm ever gong to switch to SMB3, now might be the time to do it. I saw a lot of hype about it but when I set up my NetApp I don't believe they supported SMB3, I think that was added in later in an update, so obviously went with iSCSI. And not that I'm having any issues with iSCSI, it's working great, just thought if there's any advantages to using SMB3 maybe I'd move to that. So far not seeing any though other than not having to configure the initiators, but that's not really a big deal. Thanks for the quick responses, very much appreciated.

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Philip Elder

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Rick Goodman

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Thanks to both of you for the input. I guess I had it right the first time, iSCSI, so I will leave it as is. Have a great day.