I want to give a brief overview of our network first.
We have VMware 5.1 in a cluster and plenty of windows server 2003 and 2008 with single vmdks that range from 40-80 gigs depending on what the server is used for. These sit in LUNs on the SAN which are formatted in VMFS5. On the network side of things we have a dedicated SAN network and 16TB SAN which is iSCSI.
We have been using windows servers for a while doing just about everything except serving users files. This is a school so they have been stuck in the past with Novell for far to long. I recently got the chance to move away from novell and over to ms. All that we use the novell for is login and file sharing. My plan is to implement two AD servers. I want to create between one to three file servers depending. We have about 250 users who will require about 2gigs of storage space. So a total of 500gigs for users home folders. We will also need a Apps folder which won't require over 200gig of space.
The way I see it there are probably three ways to do this.
Method1: Create a file server with the following
Single vmdk file about 800GB which the OS resides on and both folders
C:\Home\usernames
C:\Apps\appnames
Method2: Create a file server with 2-3 virtual disk files
vmdk 100GB - C:\ OS installed here
vmdk 500GB - D:\ Userdata here
vmdk 200GB - E:\ Apps here
With this method I can easily move the vmdks to another server and reattach in the event of the OS going south for whatever reason.
Method3: Create seperate luns and use the windows software iSCSI initiator (is there a performance hit here?)
vmdk 100GB - C:\ OS installed here
Userdata LUN on SAN 500GB via initiator formatted with NTFS or new ReFS?
Apps LUN on SAN 200GB via initiator formatted with NTFS or new ReFS?
Whats the best practice for this? Pros and Cons? Etc. What are people doing in the business world? I want to do this in a way which allows for some growth while also not plaguing us with problems in the future.
Also should we specifically install the server as a Windows 2012 File Server role?