virtualization - new hyper V High Avaliability setup and SMB 3.0 storage

I am looking at building an new 2012 R2 with Hyper V setup, everything has to be HP hardware.

2x HyperV 2012 R2 servers running 20-30 VMs. These will be dual 6 core xeons with 128gb of ram.

2x 2012 R2 back end storage servers running SMB 3.0 shares, connected to the front end VM servers with multiple 10gb ethernet connections. Not sure on the hardware requirements for these servers so advice helpful.

2x SAS 6gb external enclosure for each storage server. Probably HP d2600 enclosures.

A couple of questions:

• What is the best way to achieve high availability and redundancy in this setup? Should I use replicas or a HV cluster?


• What is the best way to ensure redundancy of the storage back ends? File share clustering?


• Would the performance of the SAS enclosure be fast enough? What kind of drives would be suitable for this? Would 7.2k SAS drives be enough or would we need faster? What would be the best raid setup? Initially there would be 12 drives expanding to 24. Would a mix of fast SAS or SSD and SATA be more efficient?

Thanks in advance, any help appreciated.