Windows Server 2012 : Increase scalability and performance (part 6) - Virtual Fibre Channel, SMB 3

SMB Direct Enables using network adapters capable of Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) such as iWARP, Infiniband, or RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) that can function at full speed and low latency with very little processor overhead on the host. When such adapters are used on Hyper-V hosts, you can store VM files on a remote file server and achieve performance similar to if the files were stored locally on the host.

SMB Direct makes possible a new class of file servers for enterprise environments, and the new File Server role in Windows Server 2012 demonstrates these capabilities in full. Such file servers experience minimal processor utilization for file storage processing and the ability to use high-speed RDMA-capable NICs including iWARP, InfiniBand, and RoCE. They can provide remote storage solutions equivalent in performance to Fibre Channel, but at a lower cost. They can use converged network fabrics in datacenters and are easy to provision, manage, and migrate.

SMB Directory Leasing Reduces round-trips from client to server because metadata is retrieved from a longer living directory cache. Cache coherency is maintained as clients are notified when directory information changes on the server. The result of using SMB Directory Leasing can be improved application response times, especially in in branch office scenarios.

SMB Encryption Enables end-to-end encryption of SMB data to protect network traffic from eavesdropping when travelling over untrusted networks. SMB Encryption can be configured either on a per-share basis or for the entire file server. It adds no cost overhead and removes the need for configuring IPsec and using specialized encryption hardware and WAN accelerators.

SMB Multichannel Allows aggregation of network bandwidth and network fault tolerance when multiple paths become available between the SMB client and the SMB server. The benefit of this that it allows server applications to take full advantage of all available network bandwidth. The result is that your server applications become more resilient to network failure.

SMB Multichannel configures itself automatically by detecting and using multiple network paths when they become available. It can use NIC teaming failover but doesn’t require such capability to work. Possible scenarios can include:

SMB Scale Out Allows you to create file shares that provide simultaneous access to data files with direct I/O through all the nodes in your file server cluster. The result is improved use of network bandwidth and load balancing of the file server clients, and also optimization of performance for server applications. SMB Scale Out requires using CSV version 2, which is included in Windows Server 2012, and lets you seamlessly increase available bandwidth by adding cluster nodes.

SMB Transparent Failover Allows administrators to perform hardware or software maintenance of nodes in a clustered file server without interruption to server applications storing their data on file shares. If a hardware or software failure happens on a cluster node, SMB clients will reconnect transparently to another cluster node with no interruption for server applications storing data on these shares.

SMB Transparent Failover supports both planned failovers (such as maintenance operations) and unplanned failovers (for example, due to hardware failure). Implementing this feature requires the use of failover clustering, that both the server running the application and the file server are running Windows Server 2012, and that the file shares on the file server have been shared for continuous availability.