{"id":12786,"date":"2012-06-13T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-06-13T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=12786"},"modified":"2015-10-09T12:18:17","modified_gmt":"2015-10-09T11:18:17","slug":"when-to-use-and-when-not-to-use-a-scale-out-file-server","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=12786","title":{"rendered":"When To Use And When NOT To Use A Scale-Out File Server"},"content":{"rendered":"

The new transparent failover, scalable, and continuously available active-active file server cluster, better known as Scale-Out File Server (SOFS) sounds really cool.\u00a0 Big, cheap disk, that can be bundled into a file server cluster that has higher uptime than everything that came before.\u00a0 It sure sounds like a cool way to provision file shares for end users.<\/p>\n

And there\u2019s the problem.\u00a0 As announced at Build in 2011, that is not what the Scale-Out File Server For Applicaion Data<\/em> (to give it it\u2019s full name) is intended for.\u00a0 Let\u2019s figure out why; I always say if you understand how something works then you understand why\/how to use something, and how\/why not<\/em> to use it.<\/p>\n

The traditional active\/passive clustered file server uses a shared-nothing disk that takes a few seconds to fail over from host to host. And it is active\/passive.\u00a0 The SOFS is active-active.\u00a0 That means the file share, or the cluster resource, must be accessible on all nodes in the SOFS cluster.\u00a0 We need a disk that is clustered and available on all nodes at the same time.\u00a0 Does that sound familiar?\u00a0 It should if you read this blog: because that\u2019s the same demand Hyper-V has.\u00a0 And in W2008 R2 we got Clustered Shared Volume (CSV), a clustered file system where one of the nodes orchestrates the files, folders, and access.<\/p>\n

In CSV the CSV Coordinator, automatically handled by the cluster and made fault tolerant, handles all orchestration.\u00a0 Example of that orchestration are:<\/p>\n