Enterprise File Services using Windows Server 2008 R2 – CIFS/SMB 2.x in Details

While Windows Server 2008 and Vista introduces the version 2.0 of the Server Message Block protocol (aka File and Printer Sharing in humanly readable words), Windows Server 2008-R2 and Seven both bring a refreshed version, the 2.1. Instead of drilling down right-here into the protocol's details, I found more useful to post links to the most interesting resources on the Web.

Protocol Specification and Details

• MSDN - File System Behavior in the Microsoft Windows Environment
• MSDN – Server Message Block (SMB) Protocol Specification
• MSDN - Server Message Block (SMB) Version 2 Protocol Specification
• MSDN Channel 9 - Server Message Block (SMB2.1) Drill-down
• MSDN channel 9 - File Access Services Systems Overview Presentation
• Wireshark Wiki - Server Message Block Protocol (SMB)
• Wireshark Wiki – Server Message Block Protocol (SMB) Version 2
• Jose Barreto’s Blog – File Server Performance Improvements with SMB2 Protocol in Windows Server 2008
• Ask the Performance Team Blog – Two Minute Drill Overview of SMB2

Tuning and Optimization

• MSDN Channel 9 - Windows 7: Optimizing Applications for Remote File Services over the WAN
• Microsoft Windows Hardware Developer Central– Performance Tuning Guidelines for Windows Server 2008 R2 (see chapter “Performance Tuning for File Servers”)
• Neil Carpenter's Blog - SMB/CIFS Performance Over WAN Links
• Microsoft Open Specification Support Team Blog - SMB 2.1 Multi-Credit (Large MTU) Operations
• TechNet Magazine - End-to-End WAN Optimization with BranchCache
• MSDN Code - BranchCache Bandwidth Saving Calculation PowerShell Script for the SMB Protocol

Support and Troubleshooting

• MSDN Channel 9 - Troubleshooting Windows SMB/SMB2 Issues
• MSDN Code - Diagnosing a BranchCache deployment for the SMB protocol
• MS KB - MS09-050: Vulnerabilities in SMB could allow remote code execution

Extra Goodies: Multi-threaded Robocopy and GUI

Although not directly related to SMB 2.1, Robocopy was also updated with the recent version of Windows. The main improvement is the support for multi-threaded operations, particularly interesting when massive file copy operations must take place against small files over WAN connections. I will cover this in details in a coming post. See http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd542631.aspx for details. Important to note that this option is NOT compatible with the inter-packet gap option (copy using throttling).

Not so new, for those reluctant to learn and exploit all Robocopy command-lines params, there are cool GUI’s available out there, RichCopy being, like its names says it all, the richest one.

Marc