Odditory made a comment in another thread about SMB 3.0 and Bandwidth Aggregation that has really got me thinking. Rather than hijack Sboesh's thread I thought I'd start a new one for discussion just on this topic:
A powerpoint/training on SMB3.0
A video specifically on Bandwidth aggregation
An above-average TechNet blog on the same topic
So in its basics it looks pretty straightforward, but I've got a bunch of questions about some reasonable configurations.
For example, what if the server has 1 or 2 10Gbe links but the client has a group of 3 or 4 (or more) 1Gbe links? Can it effectively figure this out and set up four streams to the client, spread across the two 10Gbe links for load balancing?
Do all of the links need to be on the same subnet? Or could one link go to one subnet and one link go to a second subet (presumably on a second switch/router - poor man's router redundancy)?
If you can split subnets, could you share a single link to the "normal" network with 1 (or more) direct point-to-point links to the server? This would be interesting if the client-server direct links used some non-traditional link layer like Infiniband or point-to-point 10Gbe?
Lots of silly questions like this running around in my otherwise empty head...
Also - while this is all very interesting, the relative immaturity of Storage Spaces (compared to ZFS) might make the entire topic moot for a couple of years. Which begs another question: does anybody know if there are plans to support Samba 4.0 on Solaris (or a breed of Linux with ZOL support)? At least one of the links above suggests that Samba 4.0 supports SMB 3.0.
Just rambling...
Lots of questions - so I went google'ing and found a couple of pretty good write-ups on this topic:As an FYI if you decide to upgrade to Windows8 and Server 2012, teaming is moot for home usage unless you're after redundancy, since SMB3.0 aggregates links automatically. As you may already be aware, NIC teaming doesn't spread your transfers across the aggregated nics.
With dual Intel nics on both my Win8 workstation and Server2012 I got about 225-240MB/s on file transfers. For kicks I added a cheap $20 dual-Intel GbE nic to both server and workstation and connected two more cables and transfers doubled again to about 440-460MB/s - and you can see it working in task manager with all four nics hitting a hair away from theoretical max. Dual 10GbE nics and Infiniband nics are next on the playlist. Crazier yet is you can hot-add and remove nics DURING a transfer and SMB3 ratchets up or down on the fly - totally dynamic. I'm sure it'll be a boon for WANs as well.
quick screenshot of nics in task manager while copying from server to single ssd -- however throughput gets much higher when i'm copying from fast array on server to ssd array on workstation - about 980Mb/s per nic sustained and totally symmetrical.
A powerpoint/training on SMB3.0
A video specifically on Bandwidth aggregation
An above-average TechNet blog on the same topic
So in its basics it looks pretty straightforward, but I've got a bunch of questions about some reasonable configurations.
For example, what if the server has 1 or 2 10Gbe links but the client has a group of 3 or 4 (or more) 1Gbe links? Can it effectively figure this out and set up four streams to the client, spread across the two 10Gbe links for load balancing?
Do all of the links need to be on the same subnet? Or could one link go to one subnet and one link go to a second subet (presumably on a second switch/router - poor man's router redundancy)?
If you can split subnets, could you share a single link to the "normal" network with 1 (or more) direct point-to-point links to the server? This would be interesting if the client-server direct links used some non-traditional link layer like Infiniband or point-to-point 10Gbe?
Lots of silly questions like this running around in my otherwise empty head...
Also - while this is all very interesting, the relative immaturity of Storage Spaces (compared to ZFS) might make the entire topic moot for a couple of years. Which begs another question: does anybody know if there are plans to support Samba 4.0 on Solaris (or a breed of Linux with ZOL support)? At least one of the links above suggests that Samba 4.0 supports SMB 3.0.
Just rambling...