I am planning on building a HA 2012R2 Storage Spaces Cluster.
OK, here is what I am planning…
2 2012R2 Servers each with a LSI LSI00300 (9207-8e) PCI-Express 3.0 x8 Low Profile SATA / SAS Host Controller Card
Those will be hooked to a LSI 630J 12Bay JBOD enclosure with dual ESM modules.
And the enclosure will be populated with 9 dual port SAS HDDs, and 3 dual port SAS SSDs. (1 extra of each for a hot spare for each pool) The SSDs will be configured purely as a WBC for the HDDs.
Does anyone see any glaring compatibility issues or problems here?
Best Answer
1) LSI 630J is not listed as "Certified for Windows Server 2012 R2 Storage Spaces". See:
http://www.windowsservercatalog.com/results.aspx?&chtext=&cstext=&csttext=&chbtext=&bCatID=1642&cpID=0&avc=79&ava=0&avq=0&OR=1&PGS=25&ready=0
Technically this means you'll have zero support after MSFT would discover you have an unsupported configuration.
2) Single SAS JBOD is still a single point of failure as passive components still can fail. You need to deploy three SAS JBODs (make sure LSI controllers support SES) to have fully fault tolerant config. Pretty expensive... Google for "enclosure awareness". See:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/privatecloud/archive/2013/04/05/windows-server-2012-about-clustered-storage-spaces-issue.aspx
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/11382.storage-spaces-frequently-asked-questions-faq.aspx#Enclosure_Awareness_Support_Tolerating_an_Entire_Enclosure_Failing
"Enclosure Awareness Support - Tolerating an Entire Enclosure Failing To support deployments that require an added level of fault tolerance, Storage Spaces supports associating each copy of data with a particular JBOD enclosure. This capability is known as enclosure awareness. With enclosure awareness, if one enclosure fails or goes offline, the data remains available in one or more alternate enclosures.
To use enclosure awareness with Storage Spaces, your environment must meet the following requirements:
JBOD storage enclosures must support SCSI Enclosure Services (SES). Storage spaces must use the mirror resiliency type if you're using Windows Server 2012: To tolerate one failed enclosure with two-way mirrors, you need three compatible storage enclosures. To tolerate two failed enclosures with three-way mirrors, you need five compatible storage enclosures."