SOFS

[bmcminfra]

Is there a plan to support SOFS for general file server workloads instead of just Hyper-V and SQL Server? If no, how does one build a high-performance scale-out Windows file share cluster for general file sharing and avoid the single node SMB share owner from being a bottleneck?

[#2]

Hi Elliott,

Short answer is that there is no changes to the fundamental architecture to SoFS coming in the fall Windows Server release 1709.  You are correct that a SoFS was designed for the role of being file based storage, it works really well with application I/O patterns that are low metadata updates and high read/write.  So you can actually use it as a traditional file server, but it really depends on the I/O pattern of the app.  For example office files (.doc / .ppt / .xls) are low data and heavy metadata, so they don't naturally suite themselves...  but they do work.  You gain zero downtime for unplanned failures, but there is performance impact.  You can mitigate this by scaling up the intra-cluster network... such as using 10 Gbps NIC's or RDMA.

Here's a blog which goes into more details:

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/filecab/2013/12/05/to-scale-out-or-not-to-scale-out-that-is-the-...

Thanks!
Elden

[#3]

[Speaking about using traditional file sharing]

ok, so no plans to support traditional file sharing workloads. In an ideal world, scaling up the number of servers should *increase* the performance. That's not possible in the current implementation.