Tag Archives: multichannel

Demystifying SMB 3.x multichannel – part 2 – server to server example with windows teaming tool (server manager / powershell)

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As you probably saw in my previous post – if you leave your cards just as they are – connected to switch SMB multichannel kicks in when you start to copy something to another machine that also has multiple NICs … But what happens in server to server scenario when you team your interfaces by using teaming that is included in windows – the one that you can configure by using server manager (and of course by using PS).
Well when you team your interfaces you get a new interface (you will see an interface with Microsoft Network Adapter Multiplexor).
Well in server to server scenario it means that you have only one NIC which reduces the speed of your copying to a speed of a single card in NIC.
As you can see also in Powershell by using Get-SmbMultichannelConnection cmdlet we have just one session.
Yes, if there was a third server we would probably start using next NIC so we would have 2 gigabit traffic from server 1 – 1 gigabit to server 2 and 1 gigabit to server 2 – but still just a gigabit to each of them.

Just a quick remark … You can create teaming interface by using Server manager or you can use Powershell – more information about creating teamed interface can be found here.

Demystifying SMB 3.x multichannel – part 1 – quick introduction

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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

smb dialect

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