Let's go into cluster storage a little bit deeper.
It's like peeling away layers of the proverbial onion.
I want to double‑click into the Windows failover clustering storage options.
I want to contrast the traditional shared storage model with
Microsoft's proprietary Storage Spaces Direct technology.
When I'm talking traditional shared storage,
I'm talking about where you have dedicated hardware arrays of storage,
a storage area network, block level network access storage.
The disks are normally serial attached SCSI,
and the connectivity is normally either Fibre Channel or iSCSI.
Now this is going to give you speed, scalability, security.
The storage array may have their own backup and recovery options,
they may have their own resiliency options,
but you're going to pay because it's extra money for that storage.
It's learning curve, it's job role stuff,
so there is a lot of overhead with this option.
Multipath I/O is a Windows Server feature where you could have
your SAN with multiple network interconnects,
redundant interconnects to where if one connection between a server
across the network to a storage array LUN were to fail,
the server could use a backup path.
Another software feature of Windows Server is the
idea of network adapter teaming, same idea.
So these are just Windows Server features that you can bring to
bear to increase the availability and speed.
So that works fine with Windows failover clustering,
but you're going to, on your exam, need to know about,
more about, much more about Storage Spaces Direct,
and some value props here, as I alluded to earlier,
you can use serial‑attached SCSI, just a bunch of disks,
or JBOD enclosures, in other words,
we're talking about commodity hardware where we can
combine that if your cluster nodes have fairly recent
network interfaces that support SMB, Server Message Block 3,
and Remote Direct Memory Access, or RDMA.
You can overcome the difference in speed that you might normally expect
between servers using their own storage and their own direct attached
storage and a high speed SAN as an alternative.
I mean, let's face it, if you were to do a benchmark,
your traditional shared storage is probably going to win every day,
but there are benefits to Storage Spaces Direct beyond just the fact
you don't have to have all that extra infrastructure.
You can layer in some of these native Windows Server technologies.
Cluster shared volumes is a nice efficient way to
surface your shared storage that, again,
is directly attached to each cluster node,
and you can surface those logical volumes on all nodes to
make that roll switch over even faster.
Again, multipath I/O, teamed NICs.
So I just want you to go back and forth kind of A/B test.
If your business already has SAN, well your decision may be made,
but for the exam, I just can't emphasize this enough.
You really need to be on board with Storage Spaces Direct,
and I want to encourage you that you can set up S2D and failover clustering all on your own lab environment using Hyper‑V.