File sharing high availability in Skype for Business Server

Learn about ensuring high availability of your file shares in Skype for Business Server, using DFS.

To ensure high availability for file sharing in your Skype for Business Server deployment, you can use the Distributed File System (DFS). DFS supports failover from one file server to another within the same data center. For a large scale deployment, we recommend that you use dedicated file servers that are paired using DFS. For more information on DFS in Windows Server 2012, see https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=524384. For information on DFS on Windows Server 2008, see https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=524385.

Depending on your network's size, and the amount of resiliency you want, you can use one pair of servers to host all file shares in a site, or use one pair per Front End pool.

DFS is a best effort file replication mechanism, with no published recovery time objective (RTO) or recovery point objective (RPO) commitment. A failover between DFS servers should be completed quickly, but data replication delay may prevent users from being able to continue work in progress when the failover happens.

If you use DFS and the data store on the fileshare is critical, you should back up the file shares frequently, such as every 4 to 8 hours. When one file share goes down and replication is not up to date, you can use the backup to restore the content on the failed server to the other server that is paired with the server that is now unavailable.