SMB Transparent Failover

Improvements to the Server Message Block (SMB) 3.0 protocol, including SMB Transparent Failover, enable network-attached storage (NAS) with fault tolerance for storing data such as SQL Server data and logs and Hyper-V virtual hard drive (VHD) files. The components that implement SMB Transparent Failover are shown here.

Application servers, such as SQL Server, expect storage to be continuously available and, in the event of a server failure, need to fail over without administrator intervention so that the application can continue to run and no data is lost or damaged. With Windows Server 2012 and SMB Transparent Failover, a server running an application such as SQL Server is the SMB client, and the SQL Server data and logs can be stored on fault-tolerant shares on a different Windows Server 2012 server. If a share is unavailable due to maintenance or failure, the Witness client and protocol will detect the failure and notify the client. Communication between the client and the server will temporarily stop.