Q: What is Windows Server 2012 Transparent Failover?

A: Transparent Failover for SMB 3.0 shares allows a SMB 3.0 client connecting to a SMB 3.0 share hosted on a Windows Server 2012 Failover Cluster to move to a different host in the cluster hosting the share without any loss of handles or locks and no noticable downtime to the SMB 3 client.

This is critical for workloads such as a Hyper-V virtual machine (VM) or SQL Server database hosted on a SMB 3.0 share where it's not acceptable for that application to lose its handles and locks if a node in the cluster fails.