As I’ve been reviewing my Hyper-V and storage infrastructure at work, I can’t help but wish that future technology was available right now.
Primarily, I wish I had production ready releases of:
- Windows Server 8 (For Hyper-V 3.0)
- 802.11ac devices
Within my environment, running on our Dell MD3220i SAN I’ve got a file server VM with multiple VHDs attached. Most of these VHDs correspond to a DFS folder target that is being replicated using DFSR. The problem is that the folder target storing the majority of files is projected to grow beyond 2TB before the end of 2012.
My short term plan is to use a passthrough disk to a new LUN on an MD1220 attached to our SAN, but I’d really like to keep it contained within a VHDX file from Windows Server 8.
The reason for that is BACKUPS. The plan I’m thinking about right now is to use Hyper-V Replica to an offsite server for disaster recovery, with file-level backups of the contents of our VMs to an offsite NAS using some method of dedupe and compression. Again, waiting on Windows Server 8 for that.
The issue with this backup plan is connectivity to our offsite location which is a building across the parking lot from our head office that we lease.
Right now it’s connected by an 802.11a connection at 54Mbps. That’s really too slow to be able to do backups across, especially when we’re looking at just 500GB of Exchange data.
I’d really love to be able to set up an 802.11ac device that provides up to gigabit throughput. While I have read manufacturers such as Broadcom are working on these chips, they’re not commercially available yet.
The implementation of just these two things would make me much happier with my infrastructure and give me better scalability for the future.
