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Demystifying SMB 3.x multichannel – part 3 – Hyper-V server to Hyper-V server example with windows teaming tool (server manager / powershell) and VMSwitch on top

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As I told you at the beginning of this series I am a big fan of Hyper-V – I have been implementing it since 2008 (when nobody believed this would ever become a serious virtualization platform :)). So in Windows server 2012 / 2012 R2 the most common way of setting up your Hyper-V networking was to just team your NICs by using Windows provided tool and then just to create a VMSwitch on top of it – by using Hyper-V manager or Powershell and by using the checkbox Allow management operating system to share this network adapter. After this process you ended up with a new virtual NIC called for example vEthernet (Team01).

Like in previous scenario (part 2) we have 1 gigabit speed when copying files from server to server. And 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.

In this video you can see that we are upgrading previous scenario (teamed NICs) by enabling Hyper-V Virtual Switch (External type) using Hyper-V Manager – you could also do that by using Powershell following the documentation.

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.