DRBD is a protocol for mirroring the storage on one server with the storage on another. Essentially it gives you a highly available (HA) cluster of storage across two or more physical machines, without the need for an expensive SAN.
It seems this kind of setup is possible in Linux, but I use Windows 2012 and Hyper V to host my virtual machines, some of which are Win 2012, some of which are Linux.
Put simply – is it possible to either create a DRBD setup on a Windows machine – I've seen the Starwind app but they want silly money for it – you may as well buy a SAN? Alternatively is it possible to create a DRBD share on 2 Linux boxes, and then use that storage for cluster Hyper V storage? Can a DRBD share on Linux present itself as an iSCSI target / SMB 3 volume?
Best Answer
I doubt you can get DRBD to run on Windows, but you can easily create a DRBD device on Linux and export it as an iSCSI target, as the DRBD device is just another block device for the Linux storage layer.
Using Samba4 to export an SMB3 share should be possible as well, but I have no experience with this.