Server 2012 Upgrade direction Advice

Question

Hi All, My Scenario:
Around 80 users
I have a server 2008 VM which has around 1tb of file shares on it and 500gb of exchange, and seems to be increasing at a pretty decent rate (company expanding etc.) the host sits on needs to be replaced (out of warranty and resources are running out), and
disks are getting full etc. fileshare access speeds are slow at times, especially if there is any kind of load on the server.
I am looking at my options for future expansion, what I want to achieve is
Faster network share access – currently access speeds are a problem
Put exchange onto a separate server / VM
Scalable file share location – at the moment I keep needing to extend disks etc.
I have about 30 VM’s in total doing various different things over about 4 Hosts, which are also part of this environment and I would like them to benefit from whatever solution I put in.
We are 90% virtual, some ESXi free and some HyperV 2012. I intend on moving in the direction of Hyper-V from here on for the most part as the standby replication feature and shared nothing migration are too good to pass up on
I am trying to figure out whether I just buy another host server with more disk space, and put a couple of VM’s on it doing file shares and exchange (which is what I did last time and ended up here)
Or do I go down the path of an ISCSI SAN and some high availability etc.
Or do I look as some kind of SMB 3 SOFS solution (still a little unsure on how all this would work)
I’m also considering putting in some kind of  archive solution to get some of the older files off the file shares and onto a cheaper NAS storage to reduce the backup size etc.
I plan to build new VM's on Server 2012 (R2) and decommission the old ones once data is migrated over. Exchange version is currently 2007, will probably move that to 2010 (as that's what we are licensed for) depending if I can set up a 2010 SCR equivalent
at our DR site with EX2010 and server 2012 (you needed enterprise server to use Ex2010 HA features but server 2012 I assume can do this in the standard version) 
I’m keen for anyone’s recommendations and ideas on which path to go down, peoples successes fails etc, is it worth stepping up to a cluster / SAN / High availability type setup?
Cheers

Answer 1

Your questions are pretty broad for a technical forum designed to help people with specific technical issues.  It sounds like you need to hire a consultant to come in and evaluate your needs and environment and make a recommendation.
SOFS is really meant to be used for Hyper-V and SQL, not for general file share usage.  See
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831349.aspx for more information.  For VMs and SQL, it works great - easier to configure than iSCSI.  The issue is that you won't find
SOFS from many SAN vendors.  Most implementations are in the form of building a Windows Server cluster with some sort of shared storage like SAS or PCI RAID.  There is a lot of information on TechNet on it that you can read to your heart's content.
.:|:.:|:. tim