Making CIFS shares highly available

Prior to Windows Server 2012, the only solutions for making file servers redundant was to use Clustering Services. In that case, if the primary server went offline, the backup server would take ownership of the cluster resources. This active/passive configuration provided redundancy during a failure, but forced the connections to be reestablished and caused issues with some applications. Additionally, the time necessary to identify the failure and perform the failover could cause data loss or other problems.

In Windows Server 2012, we can now use Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) to present highly available file shares. CSV was originally created for hosting virtual machines and allows for multiple nodes in a Windows cluster to access the same file system simultaneously. This allows us to present a file share in an active/active configuration with multiple servers providing the file share. If a server is taken offline for any reason, the client connections will...