Cluster Volume Manager (CVM) is a new way to do storage management in a clustered environment. With CVM, failover capabilities are now available at a volume-level granularity. Volumes under CVM allow exclusive write access across multiple nodes of a cluster. In a Microsoft Failover Clustering environment, you can now create clustered storage out of shared disks, which lets you share volume configurations and enable fast failover support at volume-level. Each node recognizes the same logical volume layout and, more importantly, the same state of all volume resources. The same logical view of disk configuration and any changes to this view are available on all the nodes.

The CVM Master node exists on a per-cluster basis and uses GAB (Group Atomic Broadcast) and LLT (Low Latency Transport) to transport its configuration data.

CVM is based on a "Master and Slave" architecture pattern. At any given time, one node of the cluster acts as a Master, while the rest of the nodes take the role of a Slave. The Master node is responsible for maintaining the volume management configuration information. Each time a Master node fails, a new Master node is selected from the surviving nodes.