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SAP-C02 Practice Question 29: Windows File Server Migration

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C02) · Test 3 · question 9 of 10

Migration and Modernizationeasy

A manufacturer is closing a data centre that hosts 40 TB of departmental SMB file shares on two ageing Windows Server file servers. The servers are joined to an on-premises Active Directory domain, users are authenticated as domain accounts, and access is governed by NTFS access control lists that took years to curate. Desktop clients reach the shares by UNC path.

The shares must move to AWS with the NTFS ACLs and Active Directory authentication intact, and desktop clients must keep using the SMB protocol without any change to the applications that write to the shares. The new storage must survive the loss of an Availability Zone, and the infrastructure team, which has no Windows storage specialists left, wants AWS to handle patching, backups, and failover.

What should the solutions architect recommend?

Select one answer
Show answer and explanation

Answer:

  • C. Create a Multi-AZ Amazon FSx for Windows File Server file system joined to the Active Directory domain, and copy the data to it with AWS DataSync

FSx for Windows File Server is a fully managed service built on a native Windows file system. It speaks SMB, enforces access at the file and folder level with Windows ACLs, and authenticates users against Microsoft Active Directory, so the curated NTFS permissions and the domain login flow carry over and clients keep using UNC paths unchanged. A Multi-AZ file system provisions and maintains a standby file server in a second Availability Zone with automatic failover, which covers the AZ resilience requirement, and AWS keeps the Windows software patched, takes daily backups, and handles hardware failures, the operational burden the team cannot staff.

Option A does present SMB, but S3 File Gateway is a cache in front of object storage: files become S3 objects, the fidelity of NTFS ACL semantics is not preserved the way a native Windows file system preserves it, and the gateway appliance itself is a single point that the team would have to run and size.

Option B keeps every one of the administrative tasks the team wants to hand over (patching Windows, sizing EBS, configuring and monitoring DFS Replication, and testing failover) on an infrastructure team with no Windows storage specialists.

Option D changes the protocol. Amazon EFS is NFS-only; it has no SMB endpoint, no Active Directory authentication, and no NTFS ACLs, so the permission model would have to be rebuilt from scratch and Windows clients would depend on the NFS client rather than native SMB.

Reference: What is FSx for Windows File Server?

Practice Test 3 ›

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