Have a three node 2012 R2 Hyper-V Cluster. The storage is a HP MSA 2000 G3 SAS Block Storage with CSV's.
We have a fileserver for all users running as VM on the cluster. Fileserver availability is important and it's difficult to take this fileserver down for the monthly patching. So we want to make these file services HA. Nearly all clients are Windows 8.1, so SMB 3 can be used.
What is the best way to make these file services HA?
1. The easiest way would probably be to migrate these fileserver ressources to a dedicated LUN on the MSA 2000, and to add a "general fileserver role" to the existing hyper-V cluster. But is it supported and a good solution to provide Hyper-V VM's and HA file services on the same cluster (even when the performance requirements for file services are not high)? Or does this configuration affect the Hyper-V VM performance too much?
2. Is it better to create a two node guest cluster with "Shared VHDX" for the file services? I'm not sure if this would even work. Because we had "Persistent Reservation" warnings when creating the Hyper-V cluster with the MSA 2000. According "http://blogs.msdn.com/b/clustering/archive/2013/05/24/10421247.aspx",
these warnings are normal with block storage and can be ignored when we never want to create Windows storage pools or storage spaces. But the Hyper-V MMC shows that "shared VHDX" work with "persistent reservations".
3. Are there other possibilities to provide HA file services with this configuration without buying new HW? (Remark: DFSR with two independet Fileservers is probably not a good solution, we have a lot of data that change frequently).
Thank you in advance for any advice and recommedations!
Franz