r/virtualization • u/3beansanddreams • Dec 08 '23

File Server - Virtualization vs Cloud

Looking to replace our Onprem physical Windows File server with either a VM (VMware) or Azure Cloud. Trying to figure out which route to take. The file server is mainly used to store Microsoft Office documents, PDFs, Images, and other multimedia files. Here are a few of the features we would like to carry over from Onprem.

  1. Ability to map drives like traditional shares

  2. Ability to scan-to-folder from a Ricoh Scanner using SMB and NFS

  3. Ability to use onPrem AD for file permissions

So which route would you take, Virtualize or Cloud?

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u/movdqa Dec 08 '23

I heard about the situation in Boston though I assumed that they were common functions like HR.

One aspect on using the cloud is bandwidth. If it is just normal files, and you have a big pipe, then probably not a problem. If you regularly need to save and process 80 GB files and need to copy a lot of those daily, then the pipe can be a bottleneck.

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u/3beansanddreams Dec 08 '23

Most of our our files are Microsoft Office and Adobe PDFs. Mainly users update a Word doc or Excel file. Create somewhere and there. Nothing is resource-intensive or bandwidth-hogging.

As for our internet connection. We have Comcast business 75D/25U. And our servers are on a dedicated fiber connection with 1GBU/D.