There have been many new advancements in Windows Server technologies in the past few Windows Server releases. Many of these have improved upon the core features of Windows Server, including the resiliency and high-availability features it offers. One of the newer features found in Windows Server is Scale-Out File Server (SOFS).
Scale-Out File Server is a great feature that provides highly available file-based storage that can be used for a number of different use cases.
In this post, we will take a deeper look at Scale-Out File Servers.
What is it?
How does it work and how is it configured?
What improvements have been made with SOFS in Windows Server 2019?
These and other topics will be discussed.
What is Scale-Out File Server?
Windows Server Failover Clustering has been a good general clustering technology for hosting access to files and folders. However, as new technologies came along such as virtualization (Hyper-V) that required more robust features such as the ability to handle open files, general file-server clustering came up a bit short.
In the case of virtual disks backing guest operating systems housed on Hyper-V hosts, there was a need for a more robust and capable clustering technology. Virtual disk files are a great example of resources on which you want to have even greater redundancy and resiliency. Scale-Out File Server (SOFS) was designed to provide resiliency to resources such as backing Hyper-V virtual machines.
With Scale-Out File Server, you can effectively satisfy the requirement of continuous availability as opposed to high availability. In other words, you want the resource housed on the Scale-Out File Server to be available no matter what, even when you have a failure.
Scale-Out File Server (SOFS) provides a robust infrastructure platform on which to support highly-available virtual machines running in a Hyper-V environment. SOFS provides the underlying storage to Hyper-V with the capability to have multiple nodes online in an active-active configuration with persistent connections between the nodes.
Read this article to know more…
