I am a big fan of SMB 3.x multi-channel feature that Microsoft implemented for the first time in Windows server 2012. As I am also a big fan of Hyper-V and I want my hosts to have the ability to copy files between them (ISOs, VHDXs …) as fast as possible I wanted to create this short series of articles about multi-channel feature. I was really happy when I saw Mr. Linus Sebastian posted a video Quadruple Your Network Speed for $100 with SMB 3.0 Multichannel! so I decided to create a small series of videos to also see what advantages of using it in a production environment are and why.

For this test I used 2x Dell R730xd with 2 CPUs (Xeon E5-2620) and with Dell Intel I350 Quad-Port Gigabit Ethernet and MikroTik switch CRS226-24G-2S+.

For those not familiar with SMB 3.x multichannel I would like to point out an (old) article by Mr. Jose Barreto: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/josebda/2012/06/28/the-basics-of-smb-multichannel-a-feature-of-windows-server-2012-and-smb-3-0/

So in this first part I would like to show, how SMB 3.x multichannel (I am putting that x there as SMB versions are changing (table at point 4) in each release of Windows server (and client too!) works.
In this demo I will be using Windows server 2019 which uses SMB dialect 3.1.1. You can check the dialect that your servers / clients are using by typing following cmdlet in Powershell: Get-SmbConnection

In the following video you can see the first example – two servers connected with 4 NICs each to the switch – without any extra configuration (there are no IP addresses configured) but you can see that when we copy files from server 1 to server 2 we utilise all 4 NICs on server 1 and all 4 NICs on server 2 – it can be clearly seen also on switch. To get information how your server utilizes SMB 3.x multichannel you can use Powershell cmdlet: Get-SmbMultichannelConnection