Handle Caching on Continuous Availability Shares

This policy setting determines the behavior of SMB handle caching for clients connecting to an SMB share where the Continuous Availability (CA) flag is enabled.

If you enable this policy setting, the SMB client will allow cached handles to files on CA shares. This may lead to better performance when repeatedly accessing a large number of unstructured data files on CA shares running in Microsoft Azure Files.

If you disable or do not configure this policy setting, Windows will prevent use of cached handles to files opened through CA shares.

Note: This policy has no effect when connecting Scale-out File Server shares provided by a Windows Server. Microsoft does not recommend enabling this policy for clients that routinely connect to files hosted on a Windows Failover Cluster with the File Server for General Use role, as it can lead to adverse failover times and increased memory and CPU usage.