As we saw in the previous module,
Windows Server failover clustering supports a good handful of cluster roles,
many of which are aligned to native Windows Server
roles, like DHCP Server and so on.
The two production workloads that I see in the industry most
commonly are highly available Hyper‑V virtual machines and
highly available file shares.
And, in particular, you can combine those two with
Scale‑Out File Server, or SOFS. SOFS is one of the two ways
to do a highly available file share, continuously available file shares.
Now,
the thing with Scale Out that's a bit different from a
traditional clustered file share is that it's active,
active.
All nodes host the share, and this is to support the fact
that when you're doing SOFS, you're not offering general
purpose file shares, instead,
SOFS is designed specifically for virtual machine hosting,
Cluster Shared Volumes and virtual machine hosting.
So when you do an SOFS clustered role, you're using Storage Spaces Direct,
you're using Cluster Shared Volumes,
you're using Hyper‑V, and you're storing those Hyper‑V VMs in the SOFS file
shares. You then get native features like automatic client rebalancing, and
this is where the failover cluster will live migrate virtual machines so that
they're active on another node, let's say,
just to make sure that a particular node isn't oversaturated with virtual
machines, okay? So to review, when you're doing a file share cluster
node, there's the file server for general use that you'll use for
traditional highly available file shares.
You can share these folders with Server Message Block or Network File System,
and these highly available shares are compatible with File Server
Resource Manager, that means you can do data deduplication. Also
compatible with Distributed File System, or DFS trees.
The other way you can go is Scale‑Out File Server for application data, and
there I had mentioned this is a great home for highly available Hyper‑V
virtual machines. But, we shouldn't forget that SQL Server databases often
will be homed on an SOFS file share as well. Just know those details for your exam, okay?