DRBD for Windows / Hyper V

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?

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.

Well, you have two options here:

1.you need to create the VMs on HAST/DRBD in FreeBSD/Linux that'll have iSCSI disks (obviously this requires configuration) and those disk will serve for Hyper-V after. This is not the most high-performable scenario, but it should work.

2.Take a look at the free Windows based SAN solutions like StarWind or something else (I'm not sure if there any other free product on the market). BTW if you`ll stick with SW product you should take a look at Native SAN scenario, which allows installing the SAN software directly on the Hyper-V server, which is pretty beneficial due to obvious reasons.