FSx for Windows File Server - AWS Prescriptive Guidance

FSx for Windows File Server

FSx for Windows File Server provides fully managed, highly reliable, and scalable file storage that is accessible by using the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol. It is built on Windows Server and delivers a wide range of administrative features such as user quotas, end-user file restore, and Microsoft Active Directory (AD) integration. It offers Single-AZ and Multi-AZ deployment options, fully managed backups, and encryption of data at rest and in transit. You can optimize cost and performance for your workloads with solid-state drives (SSD) and hard disk drives (HDD) storage options, and you can scale storage and change the throughput performance of your file system at any time. Amazon FSx file storage is accessible from Windows, Linux compute instances running on AWS, and on premises.

Amazon FSx makes it easier to deploy shared Windows storage for high availability SQL Server deployments through its support for continuously available (CA) file shares and smaller file systems. This option is suitable for these use cases:

  • As shared storage used by SQL Server nodes in a WSFC instance.

  • As an SMB file share witness that can be used with any SQL Server cluster with WSFC.

Amazon FSx provides fast performance with baseline throughput up to 2 GB/second per file system, hundreds of thousands of IOPS, and consistent sub-millisecond latencies.

To provide the right performance for your SQL instances, you can choose a throughput level that is independent of your file system size. Higher levels of throughput capacity also come with higher levels of IOPS that the file server can serve to the SQL Server instances accessing it.

The storage capacity determines not only how much data you can store, but also how many IOPS you can perform on the storage. Each gigabyte of storage provides 3 IOPS. You can provision each file system to be up to 64 TB in size.

For information about configuring and using Amazon FSx to reduce the complexity and costs of your SQL Server high availability deployments, see Simplify your Microsoft SQL Server high availability deployments using FSx for Windows File Server on the AWS Storage blog. To learn more about creating a new CA share, see the FSx for Windows File Server documentation.