I'm in the process of setting up a three-node Windows Server 2025 failover cluster for virtual machines and file shares using hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) hardware. I've come across some conflicting information regarding the Scale-out File Server (SOFS) role—it seems it's not needed in hyper-converged deployments, but then there are mentions of enabling it in certain setups. Could someone clarify whether SOFS is necessary for specific configurations in hyper-converged environments? Also, when it comes to file sharing, would it be better to enable the general File Server role on the host rather than relying on a VM to handle file shares, just to minimize overhead? Thanks for your insights!
3 Answers
Definitely check out Storage Spaces Direct for your hyper-converged cluster setup. Just a heads-up, make sure you have at least a 10 Gb network for storage traffic. I built a 4-node Hyper-V cluster this year with a 25 Gb network, and it performed outstandingly—think around 250k IOPS with NVMe caching and a combo of SSDs and HDDs for storage capacity.
Your hosts should primarily function as just that—hosts—not necessarily domain-joined. Ideally, your file servers would run as VMs instead. However, it’s worth mentioning that Microsoft actually recommends joining your hosts to the domain. I found this out the hard way myself!
True, if your Windows admin account gets compromised, it could expose the hosts too.
I learned that lesson previously—it's always a learning process. Running file servers in VMs would probably keep things cleaner on the hosts, and the overhead should be minimal.
In a hyper-converged setup, you're really using Storage Spaces Direct (S2D), not SOFS. SOFS is more for disaggregated clusters where you have separate storage and Hyper-V. With S2D, your disks act as clustered disks instead of SMB3 volumes. Regarding file shares, if you're using Server Core, the File Server role is off by default and you'll need to enable it, especially for S2D traffic, VM backups, and migrations. Shares themselves don't need to be configured, though.
Thanks for clarifying that!
We're going with a 25G network for our cluster too, and S2D seems like the way to go!