I am not sure if I should ask this question here, but I thought I would and see if anyone yells. I am trying to get a handle on the new features of windows server; I wanted to come up with a clustered solution for hyper-v and a file server using storage pools. What I would like to accomplish is the ability to add new nodes to the cluster at different geographical areas, I would do this by creating a secured tunnel connecting each location. My question is what is the best way to do this? At this point there are only 4 total physical machines, 2 Hyper-v and 2 files server with 16TB each. I want to use storage pools for the file server. Will I have to cluster the file server as well, or can I do a DFS replication and only cluster the hyper-v servers. I am just trying to wrap my head around the best way to do this so that I can continue to add servers to the cluster to increase availability and storage, while having fail-over.
Also I know that server 2012 can work with virtual DC's, is it better to have a physical DC outside and a BDC virtually? I know about the 12% degrade in performance if I choose to use both DC's as virtual guests. Also plan to install SQL and exchange as virtual guests.