So I have an established Server 2016 Hyper-V Cluster, running a variety of Windows server VM's.
If I take an existing File Server VM, it can run on any one of the 4 nodes and can be live migrated around easily. (I mean general purpose file server for users documents)
What options/solutions are there to both increase resilience and ease maintenance tasks for file servers?
We already use DFS-N so the FS would be accessed from \\DOMAIN\Share\ by the users, but only the FS VM itself is contained in the DFS-N root/config. (This was simply done after I got fed up with UNC paths changing every time I replaced a physical FS, way back when!)
I have done various reading online and I feel I'm missing a concept or a solution here.
What I really want, is a 2nd FS VM, that accesses the same Data drive that's being shared by the first VM, that can be added as a 2nd server in the DFS-N config, so that if one FS VM is offline for maintenance (for example) Staff can still access their data on the \\DOMAIN\Share. It would make it easier for me to do maintenance during the day with a 2nd, or even 3rd VM running.
Maintenance on the Hyper-V Custer Nodes is easy during the day, I just live migrate running VM's to another node and carry on with the work.
I have read up on host-clusters, shared VHDX files but I am still confused as to how to achieve my goal.
If it makes any difference, this is all running on a Dell VRTX server, which has 4 server blades and built in local storage thats made available to all 4 blades via MPIO.