Historicaly we have always had a stand-alone fileserver with a local tape backup drive along with making robocopy backup of the files to another remote server overnight. This server also hosts the printers for the LAN.
One issue I have found is that the Print server sometimes crashes and requires me to reboot the mail fileserver during the day, hardly ideal! (Simply restarting the print service doesn't work)
I have just purchased a new server (We can't afford SAN) for a new fileserver which will be built with Windows 2012.
Can anyone advise me on the best way to build this for the future?
I would ideally like to run a seperate VM for the print server, so this can easily be restarted (Does this make sense?)
What should I do for the fileserver to ensure some redundancy? run a 2nd VM for a File server? clustering?
I have a seperate backup server off-site, which I currently run simple robocopy jobs to overnight. If I upgrade this to Server 2012 can this be in a cluster or a on-line standyby?
I guess this all depends on what I am trying to achieve:-
a. Should I simply aim to have a 2nd server which has a current copy of the files ready to go (This is what I have from the evening before), but it wouldn't have all the shares ready to go... so would require some work to bring on-line if the primary FS went offline.
b. A 2nd server which is using DFS to have a copy of the files which would be quicker to bring on-line
c. Clustering to ensure immediate change-over, but would this work with 2-3TB of storage needed for the various network shares and files
d. Some other solution I haven't thought about?
I'm sure there must be a neat and sensible solution to my needs and it must be something other SME's also need.
Any advice or suggestions/thoughts gratefuly received.