Okay so we all know of windows HA clusters. Most also know of DFS for providing high availability to file servers. What I am looking for is the most transparent/seamless failover mechanism possible ...

There's some talk where I am about the possibility of replacing a file server which is currently mounting SAN storage provided by our NetApp appliance over fiber, with just serving the files directly ...

If you want to enable indexing on a Windows file server, you will need to start by installing the Windows Search Service. To do so, open Server Manager and then choose the Add Roles and Features ...