Particular embodiments provide a plurality of host machines, one or more virtual disks comprising a plurality of storage devices, and a virtualized file server (VFS) comprising a plurality of file server virtual machines (FSVMs), wherein each of the FSVMs is running on one of the host machines and conducts I/O transactions with the one or more virtual disks. A distributed health monitoring service (HMS) may be running on each of the host machines running a FSVM. The HMS may monitor the FSVMs to determine whether any of the FSVMs has failed or is having problems. The HMS may detect that a plurality of the FSVMs have failed, wherein the failed FSVMs form a portion of the FSVMs comprising the VFS. For each of the failed FSVMs, the HMS may reassign an IP address corresponding to the failed FSVM to a live one of the FSVMs.