How to make a Windows share HA or clustered

The text below is an excerpt of a document I wrote for a customer regarding how to make a file share (repository) highly available.

Please ask if you have any questions.

File share

The file share is a common repository to store files.

There are two ways to configure a file share to be highly available. One solution is Distributed File System and the other solution is Microsoft Cluster Services.

Distributed File System

DFS is a service that provides a single point of reference and a logical tree structure for file system resources that may be physically located anywhere on the network. With DFS you create a share like \\domain.local\share$ that a client (in this case the Mobile Wipe servers are the clients) connects to. All files in a DFS can be replicated among several servers and the client connects to the nearest server that is available.

Microsoft Cluster Services

Microsoft implements failover clustering for file services. You set up two (or more) servers in an active/passive configuration, which means that if a failure occurs on a server that is a member of the cluster (Cluster node) the services that the failing server was hosting will automatically restart themselves on another server that is a member of the same cluster. The process of a service moving from one server to another is called failover.