If you’re using Windows Server 2012 Failover Clustering for Scale Out File Server or for HA Hyper-V then you’ve created one or more Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV). This active-active clustered file system (where orchestration is performed by the cluster nodes rather than the file system to achieve greater scalability) is NTFS based. But wander into Disk Management and you’ll see a different file system label:
This label has two purposes:
- You can tell from admin tools that this is a CSV volume and is shared across the nodes in the cluster
- It allows applications to know that they are working with a CSV rather than a simple single-server volume. This is probably important for applications that can use the filter extensibility of Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V, e.g. replication or AV.
BTW, this screenshot is taken from the virtualised scale-out file server that I’m building with a HP VSA as the background storage.