MoSMB now supports transparent failover of servers in a clustered environment using the witness service.

In a typical data center, Clustered servers with MoSMB would be deployed on multiple nodes with the witness protocol enabled for failover support. All the nodes would be connected to a shared storage. The setup would involve setting up SMB Server in a Failover Cluster, SMB Client and Server supporting SMB 3.0 and Shares enabled for ‘Continuous Availability’.

When a node fails, the witness server would notify the client of the failure and the client would then connect to the failover Node on the cluster providing “Continuous Availability”.

The Failover is transparent to applications that are running on the client and they continue performing their operations seamlessly.

Use Cases:

• Transparent failover
• Continuous Availability (HA)
• Scale out client moves for load rebalancing

Limitations:
Limitation of the witness protocol is that the older SMB clients (pre SMB3) cannot connect to the witness service and provide transparent failover capability.

Supported Platforms:
Cent OS, FreeBSD. Ubuntu and other Linux variants can be supported on request