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Hey Nick, how many users and concurrency?

Currently, about 1000 active users, but will likely grow to 2000 very soon. I'm trying to plan for at least 5k users in the next year or so, with 20% growth per year afterwards.

Those specs should be okay initially. Monitor it closely during scale up to make sure all is well.

That's kind of what I'm afraid of. I can probably ask for 8 vCPU/24GB RAM right now, but later on, it may not be an option.

If that's the politics the. I'd suggest you get the larger spec.

Yeah, I think I'm going to just go all-out and request what I want. Wouldn't be in this spot in the first place if I was given that months ago... 😄

Very true. You live and you learn ;-)

At the very least, I should be able to migrate everyone to the new clusters seamlessly by pre-copying their containers and making the path changes in the GPO. No outage required.

Exactly. You can use bvckup for that and do it in production hours.

Would that handle currently open files, too?

That is a block level copy so you can do it whether they are locked or not ;-) it'll be fast too.

Nick, question for my layout. Are u using iscsin or fc? I'm trying to figure out how to do this with FC without RDM if it's possible

We're all FC over here.

That would be RDM method?

You'll need to use RDM though. That media type won't change that unfortunately.

Leee planted a bug in my head with SOFS and unread ur single server outage. So I'm going to do it as well. Good thing for me is I'm the server guy, VMware guy and Citrix guy. Guess I'm lucky on that part

No worries guys. I'm always here if you need a hand.

Thanks man.

My FSLogix cluster request was approved. I think they're still debating on whether or not to build two clusters (one for each container) or one. I couldn't think of any reason why that would matter if we were going to double the resources if we went with a single cluster.

Awesome. Nice one. Doesn't really matter. As long as the storage is fast enough and you have resilience you are golden.

@Leee Jeffries Dumb question, but would you take DFS-N out of the mix in a cluster scenario? Most of our Citrix shares use DFS for the namespace, but I don't believe we have anything in there hosted on clustered shares. I was just going to roll with \\ClusterAlias\Share.

Lol no worries Nick. You can add the share name per server but it's not designed that way. Better to use one or the other.

I would suggest, if there is the option, to use W2019. So you can benefit of data deduplication on ReFS. Storage cache will be important with 5k users. Depending on your configuration IOPS could be important. Cloud Cache, if we’ll set up and tested (ReFS), AV can hurt, will reduce storage iops requirements, but may add some seconds at logon Based on my experience, cloud cache is the king if you need to replicate profiles Profile replication with MSFT tools only is a nightmare. Storage level (block level) much easier but you need capable storages

Use cases do need to be carefully considered when selecting a technology indeed. David is 100% correct. Speaking of which David, I'll take a look at those masking rules tomorrow.

Another thread said this last Verison is buggy.

Ironically, me too.

😆

Lol

@Nick Panaccio You mentioned you can't add clustered shares to DFS-N. I was able to do that in my test environment just now. Maybe I'm doing something different than what you were referring to. I would like to use DFS-N for all of my shares, clustered or not. Did you end up not using DFS-N for clustered shares?

Why would you when u have the cluster name as a reference point?

For the life of me, I can't find the article I read about clustered shares and DFS-N. And no, we're using single file servers for our Profile and ODFC shares currently. My request for a single cluster using Continuous Availability was approved, and then I was told this morning that we need to look at other avenues, including some new product not currently in place (I was told it was a "NAS HA solution").

Some have CIFS replication, with a own Proprietary virtual name between NASs. Could be a good thing man.

Ray - Not all of our shares will be clustered. Would like to have one location (DFS-N) to go for all shares. But if it is not supported to add clustered shares to DFS-N then I won't do it.

Ok gotcha man

Nick - too bad you can't use Windows Failover Cluster, it works pretty well. If you happen across that article about clustered shares and DFS-N I would like to read it.

That's what I want, a normal Windows file cluster with CA. If the new solution doesn't provide CA functionality, then I'm not interested. If I do come across the article, I'll definitely let you know.

Very few NAS solutions I know of provide CA. It's an SMB thing and that's Microsoft's thing. Saying that though I believe NetApp does something similar. Would interested in the solution they provide for you. Seriously though, you could get 2 X 1U servers of a low range spec, fit SSDs and setup a SOFS 2 node. Cheap.... Probably less than a NAS and it would perform.

Take emc for example. Vnx, unity's, extreme io. The offer that. But yes, there are SANs. Not NAS.

Yep. Enterprise arrays usually have this sort of feature where they provide direct SMB shares but I was unaware of offering with CA.

I'll wait to hear back, but I don't think the two people pushing back on me are actually listening to my requirements. It's frustrating, to say the least.

We have a Isilon as well. Very good product 👍👍👍. Go with EMC if u have a say so.

I take if you're not using Isilon for your FSLogix stuff?

No im not. It was bought for the camera system. But im curious if u need two systems for the CA. Something on the road map. I was push so hard to deploy fslogix. I didn't get time to vet out all the possible solutions. So im doing like you are. Trying to figure out what is best.

I'm not sure what they're planning on doing, to be honest. They're still in the early stages, but I've got the storage admin on my side, so she'll run with it to the vendors to find out what they can do.

Keep me updated with what you do. Ill do the same. Maybe we can help each other out in doing this.

Looks like a few people have issues with FSLogix and Isilon. Need a bit more info on their environments, though. <https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/8afb3426-a214-4d27-8bc2-9cfcae6c9592/fslogix-not-creating-vhdx-volume-type?forum=FSLogix>