31 Days of our Favorite Things: Continuously Available File Shares in Windows Server 2012 (Part 18 of 31)

How much do you depend on a file share to be available at all times?

“Not much. After all, I don’t use them for anything much beyond file storage due to the performance of that kind of resource.”

CAFS in Windows Server 2012Ah.. but back in Part 17 of our series, we told you that with the new SMB 3.0 protocol, the performance rivals other high-end network-based storage (iSCSI, Fibre Channel, FCoE).  It’s so good that you could, for example, run virtual machines whose storage is just on a file share.

And if that’s the case, how important does availability of that file system become?

“Pretty important.”

Exactly.  So in Windows Server 2012 we introduce the Continuously Available File Share (CAFS), otherwise known as the Scale-Out File Server for Application Data:

“Scale-Out File Servers are ideal for server applications that keep files open for a long amount of time, doing mostly data operations with infrequent metadata operations on the file system. Hyper-V virtual hard disks and SQL Server database files can be stored on a scale-out file share on servers running Windows Server 2012.”

“So.. I can be guaranteed that the files in use for these kinds of applications will always be available?”

Precisely.

In today’s installment of our “31 Days of our Favorite Things”, guest author and PowerShell MVP Steve Murawski discusses the new continuous availability you can achieve using this new capability.

READ HIS ARTICLE HERE