My plans for reviewing/playing around in Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 have been quite up in the air lately, but may finally be coming to fruition, although differently than I originally planned. Since I have installed an EMC Celerra as my organizations primary storage, I thought testing a WSS front end to that system might be appropriate. In a previous post, I was planning to test this in my home lab, but given the considerations I am looking at for my organization, testing there makes loads more sense.
Initially, I was going to create CIFS shares on the EMC and push those out to the users, purely for the ease of use that comes with CIFS. Then I got to thinking, in our previous/current environment the WSS 2003 server is providing much the same access to files and other tools allow for the monitoring of files and folders on the shares.
With this additional monitoring capability, which we already own, and more robust storage on the back end, maybe Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 is something to consider. The only caveat here, at least for me, is that once the testing is over and the pony up phase begins, I will not reduce the footprint in the closet because there will need to be an appliance running Storage Server.
Since I am going to test things first using a virtual machine, I will leave the worrying about footprint and power and all of that until I get closer to knowing what makes the most sense. In a decent sized virtual environment, with the right hosts I do think a virtual appliance version of WSS would be a nice thing to consider, but we’ll see how the testing goes.
