Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) is exposed to the Windows OS through the Cluster Shared Volume File System (CSVFS). In a dual-layer deployment model S2D volumes are presented to compute nodes through the SMB3 protocol.

Storage nodes communicate with one another using the SMB3 protocol, including SMB Direct and SMB Multichannel.

Hyper-V is capable of supporting virtual guest clusters by leveraging "VHD Set" files, a feature that was introduced in Hyper-V 2016.