Cluster Shared Volumes

Cluster Shared Volumes is a cluster file system for the Windows Hyper-V and File Server workloads. It enables concurrent access to volumes and files from any node in a Windows Server Failover Cluster. In this session, we will describe how Cluster Shared Volumes leverages and extends existing Windows technology, such as NTFS for metadata and storage allocation, SMB 3.0 for high-speed interconnect, Volume Snapshot Service for distributed backups, oplocks for cache coherency, and failover clusters for multi-node coordination.

Learning Objectives

Review the scenarios targeted by Cluster Shared Volumes.
Explain how Cluster Shared Volumes is layered between client applications and NTFS.
Understand the conditions under which multiple cluster nodes can concurrently access NTFS volumes at block level.
Describe how SMB 3.0 and failover clusters are used for efficient solve multi-node problems, such as metadata updates and snapshot coordination.