Highly available network file server

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NOTE: These settings will only apply to the browser and device you are currently using. HA-NFS offers a different solution for each: dual-ported disks and impersonation are used to provide server reliability, disk mirroring can be used to provide disk reliability, and optional network replication can be used to provide network reliability.

The implementation shows that HA-NFS provides high availability without the excessive resource overhead or the performance degradation that characterize traditional replication methods. Ongoing operations are not aborted during fail-over and recovery is completely transparent to applications. This IP address and name is the name that will be added to AD for the cluster, the IP Address added here is the IP address that will float between nodes during a failover.

Bear in mind that each role we add to the cluster will also require an IP. Make sure both disks have the same configuration. Now we will add these disks to the cluster, hop back to failover cluster manager. Navigate to the Storage section, Disks.

Select Add Disk. In a cluster, each node will have a vote, the reason for the vote is so that the cluster can achieve Quorum, an agreement on which node s are active and if the cluster should be up and running. In order to solve that problem, we add a disk witness. This is a shared volume that will automatically be passed to whichever node it up and running at the time, this disk witness acts as a vote giving the active live node a majority vote and therefore being able to keep the cluster active.

Note here that there are many types of witness available. You can also use a network location or just simply create a 3 rd VM as a witness which is in the cluster but does not host the roles. A popular one in public cloud environments is to use a cloud witness. We see here the quorum volume we setup earlier, if you see more than one disk just click the plus to see the volume size.

You are likely to run into problems if you do select this type of volume for file storage. The reason, Continuous Availability is something we will be using to ensure no interruption of service to user during a cluster failover, this synchronises the SMB sessions and handles.

If the cluster attempts to this on lots of small files performance will grind to a halt. You will also note here that Continuous Availability is enabled already as we picked the correct role at the start of the wizard. You now have a file cluster with continuous availability that can be used for any profile disk solution. I have also embedded a video below to demonstrate what happens to a real user during a failover.

Great article Leee thanks. Hi Dave, thank you sir. RDM for cluster on a seperate nodes. Question: Since you have added an existing hard disk Node 1 Hard disk on Node 2. But my performance is horrible, due to the HA setting for each share. If I did do this, how can one then access the file shares?