I am in process of deploying a Windows 2012 R2 Standard server, as a primary file server for our environment. I have create an 80GB VM, which is acting as the C: drive, and is solely for the OS and logs.
My questions is, for the D: partition/volume (used only for data sharing/collection) does it make more sense from an administrative standpoint to create this as another virtual machine and then mount that as the D: drive, or is it just simpler to create a LUN from my storage array and mount it to the virtual machine using iSCSI? I'm using a Nimble Storage array for all VMs and iSCSI LUNs.
The initial size of the D: volume will be 1.5TB, and I want the flexibility to be able to dynamically grow it, when it starts reaching capacity.