To provide nondisruptive operations for application servers using continuously available SMB connections, the volume containing the share must be an NTFS volume. Moreover, it must always have been an NTFS volume. You cannot change a mixed security-style volume or UNIX security-style volume to an NTFS security-style volume and directly use it for nondisruptive operations over SMB shares. If you change a mixed security-style volume to an NTFS security style volume and intend to use it for nondisruptive operations over SMB shares, you must manually place an ACL at the top of the volume and propagate that ACL to all contained files and folders. Otherwise, virtual machine migrations or database file exports and imports where files are moved to another volume can fail if either the source or the destination volumes were initially created as mixed or UNIX security-style volumes and later changed to NTFS security style.

Application servers that connect to continuously available shares receive persistent handles that allow them to reconnect nondisruptively to SMB shares and reclaim file locks after disruptive events, such as takeover, giveback, and aggregate relocation.

The volume on which the SQL Server database files reside must be large enough to hold the database directory structure and all contained files residing within the share.