No, no, FBI is not in the storage business and there are no witnesses to protect.
However, SMB 3.0 has introduced a RPC-based mechanism to inform the clients of any state change in the SMB servers. Microsoft calls it Service Witness Protocol [SWP], and its objective is provide a much faster notification service allow the SMB 3.0 clients to do a failover. In previous SMB 1.0 and even in SMB 2.x, the SMB clients rely on time-out services. The time-out services, either SMB or TCP, could take up as much as 30-45 seconds, and this creates a high latency that is disruptive to enterprise applications.
SMB 3.0, as mentioned in my previous post, had a total revamp, and is now enterprise ready. In what Microsoft calls “Continuously Available” File Service, the SMB 3.0 supports clustered or scale-out file servers. The SMB shares must be shared as “Continuously Available” shares and mapped to SMB 3.0 clients. As shown in the diagram below (provided by SNIA’s webinar),
Client A mapping to Server 1 share (\\srv1\CAshr). Client A has a share “handle” that establishes a connection with a corresponding state of the session. The state of the session is synchronously kept consistent with a corresponding state in Server 2.
The Service Witness Protocol is not responsible for the synchronization of the states in the SMB file server cluster. Microsoft has left the HA/cluster/scale-out capability to the proprietary technology method of the NAS vendor. However, SWP regularly observes the status of all services under its watch. Continue reading
