Amazon FSx for Windows File Server
Amazon FSx for Windows File Server is an Amazon Web Services FSx solution that offers a scalable and shared file storage system built on Microsoft Windows Server, accessible over the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol.
Key points
- Uses the SMB protocol to serve file storage systems from multiple Windows servers. Distinct from Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), which serves Linux workloads over NFS.
- As a fully managed service, AWS — not the customer — is responsible for patching and updating the underlying file servers.
- Connects file systems to Amazon EC2, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon WorkSpaces, Amazon AppStream 2.0 instances, and on-premises servers via AWS Direct Connect or AWS Site-to-Site VPN.
- Deployment types: Single-AZ 1 (SSD only), Single-AZ 2 (SSD or HDD, newer generation), and Multi-AZ (SSD or HDD) — Multi-AZ runs an active and standby file server pair spread across two Availability Zones, using Windows Server Failover Clustering, with automatic failover typically completing in under 30 seconds.
- Automatically and synchronously replicates data to the standby Availability Zone to manage failover.
- Offers both SSD storage (highest performance, most latency-sensitive workloads) and HDD storage (broad-spectrum workloads like home directories and content management); storage capacity, SSD IOPS, and throughput capacity (8 MBps–2,048 MBps, in power-of-two increments) can each be provisioned and modified independently.
- Offers identity-based authentication using Microsoft Active Directory.
- AWS DataSync can be used with FSx for Windows File Server to migrate self-managed file systems to it.
- Part of the wider Amazon FSx family alongside Amazon FSx for Lustre, Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, and Amazon FSx for OpenZFS.
- Setup workflow: create the FSx for Windows File System integrated with Active Directory, configure Windows file shares and access permissions, connect application servers and end-user compute instances, then run applications sharing file data across them.