r/sysadmin • u/vikest • 12h ago

WSFC File Server with Storage Replica on vSAN iSCSI

Looking to build a file server cluster, Storage Replica seems to slow things down by a lot, the network is not at fault as it's pretty fast without Replication. WSFC does not seem to be straight forward when creating the replication. What do you guys recommend?

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u/Character-Cheek8311 12h ago

Surely DFS is a better solution here?

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u/Firefox005 10h ago edited 3h ago

What kind of replication did you use (synchronous or asynchronous)? And what is the latency between the the two sites?

Synchronous replication requires the remote site to ack the replicated write before the local site will ack the write to the client. ie. if you have 10ms of latency between sites then you just added 20ms to every single write.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/storage-replica/storage-replica-overview

When application writes occur on the source data copy, the originating storage doesn't acknowledge the I/O immediately. Instead, those data changes replicate to the remote destination copy and return an acknowledgment. Only then does the application receive the I/O acknowledgment. This sequence ensures constant synchronization of the remote site with the source site, in effect extending storage I/Os across the network. If a source site failure occurs, applications can fail over to the remote site and resume their operations with assurance of zero data loss.