Why I’m dabbling in this is a very long story, but lets assume I only have 2 servers at my disposal and want Windows Server VMs providing SMB shares without a single point of failure. Proxmox and HyperV are my options for hypervisors.
Ceph is out for a few reasons, most notably only having 2 servers, 1Gb networking and the Windows Server VM would still be a single point of failure. I’ve been reading up on Windows Storage Spaces and if I’m understanding correctly it seems I could cluster 2 physical or virtual servers, replicate the data between the 2 and present the SMB share as the cluster name/IP rather than individual servers.
Before I spend too much time setting up Windows clusters, are there any other options I should be looking into?
DFS Namespaces + DFS Replication is exacty what you want here - the namespace gives you the failover/redundancy while DFSR handles keeping the files synced between nodes (just watch out for the replication overhead on large files since it uses RDC).