Assistance with setting up server 19.

[LehnenDesigns]

Greetings,

I have installed windows server 19 on two computers for a fail-over cluster for my business. They have been connected to another PC being used for storage through the ISCSI Target/Initiator roles. My question is this, what happens if the connected disk being used as the shared storage fails? How do we properly replicate the disk and how would the clustered servers access the duplicated disk in case of a storage disk failure?

Or is there an easier way to go about having some sort of server fail-over for file sharing purposes?

[#2]

Hi,
what role do your current 2 servers provide fail-over cluster capability for? Hyper-V? SQL?

of course, you can make a fail-over cluster for a highly available file server too, you'd need to add one more server to the mix.

i found some guides for you, i only reviewed them quickly:

https://www.veeam.com/blog/how-to-create-file-server-cluster-windows-2019.html

http://resources.intenseschool.com/windows-server-2012-failover-clustering-part-3/

[#3]

Greetings,

The 2 nodes in the cluster currently only have a file sharing role. We dont have any hyper-V or SQL Roles right now. 

My biggest question is what happens if the storage disk or PC housing the ISCSI Target were to fail. Is there some type of fail-over or safety for that situation?

Thank you

[#4]

Okay so let me see if i understood it correctly,
you have 2 servers that are using a regular PC as a file server, and you are asking what happens when that PC or its components go down?

if that's the case then when that PC goes down, both of your servers naturally lose connectivity to that file server which is a PC.

i'd suggest to do this the other way around.

set up file sharing role on both of your servers, add cluster failover role, create a cluster shared volume, make it highly available and fail safe with the help of those 2 servers,
then connect it to that PC using ISCSI.

in this situation, the user behind the PC won't experience any downtime and will have access to the file server should either of those servers fail.

[#5]

@HotCakeX 

no, i have one pc that is acting as a storage box with external hard drives holding the file share location.

The two clustered pcs are both connected to the storage box using the ISCSI Initiator. The 2 pcs are clustered with high availability and the file share role where the location of the file share is a drive on the storage box. 

The question is, how do i go about getting some sort of disk replication and fail-over capability if the storage disk or pc housing the storage fails. 

The only way i could get the fail-over cluster to work was to have the storage be on a third computer and use the ISCSI Target/Initiator to get a shared storage.

[#6 · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the extra info, now i understand it,
you can use storage pools to secure your ISCSI target
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/storage-spaces/overview

RAID is not going to be good enough
https://serverfault.com/questions/448404/iscsi-distributed-raid


"Storage Spaces is a technology in Windows and Windows Server that can help protect your data from drive failures. It is conceptually similar to RAID, implemented in software. You can use Storage Spaces to group three or more drives together into a storage pool and then use capacity from that pool to create Storage Spaces. These typically store extra copies of your data so if one of your drives fails, you still have an intact copy of your data. If you run low on capacity, just add more drives to the storage pool."