SMB Multichannel Trouble with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with ZFS, SMB 4.1.6 and ZFS

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tubeamps

Active Member
Dec 1, 2014
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At this point this is a lab/learning expermient. My TS140 is running W8.1 with 2 intel NICS on the same subnet. I also have an esxi 5.5 box running a few virtual machines. The relevant VMs are 2012R2 and Ubuntu 12.04LTS. The esxi box has 2 NICs attached to a Vswitch and a 4 port i340 with 2 ports passed by VT-D to 2012R2 and 2 to Ubuntu.

From the TS140 I see exactly 112MB/s to the esxi Ubuntu ZFS share.
From the TS140 I see ~200MB/S to the esxi Windows 2012 R2 share.

From the 2012 R2 server to the Ubuntu share I see 300MB/s transfer rates over a vswitch, so disk performance seems decent.

As SMB Multichannel seems to be working from Windows to Windows I don't think network infrastructure is the problem, but for reference the TS140 is connected to a TP-Link 3210. The 3210 is connected by 2 fiber GBICs in LACP to a TP-Link 2424. All of the ports on the ESXi box are connected to the 2424.

I thought LACP on the switches might be the problem, but the Windows to Windows connections are working fine. I'm opening to trying other network configs if anyone has any suggestions.

My suspicion is that I need to configure something in Linux to support SMB multichannel. I'll note that DNS on the network is provided by a basic router, so that might be related. I've added the respective IP addresses to the hosts files, but it hasn't made a difference.

Any thoughts would be much appreciated? I'm open to experimenting and learning more.
 

PigLover

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Jan 26, 2011
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Today only windows supports SMB multipath. Linux, ESX, and other OS may support some aspects of smb3 but none of them support multipath today.

It will only work windows to windows.
 

tubeamps

Active Member
Dec 1, 2014
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I could have sworn that Samba 4.1.x introduced SMB Multichannel. Oh well. Thanks!

Between LACP, some fiber HBAs and ConnectX2 and ConnectX3 10gb gear I'll piece things together.
 

PigLover

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Jan 26, 2011
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Nope. 4.1.x (and 4.2 for that matter) got you most of SMB3 - but not all of it. Not only no multichannel but also some other critical features that cripple using Samba to store live VMs for Hyper-V.
 

zane

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Aug 22, 2013
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I could have sworn that Samba 4.1.x introduced SMB Multichannel. Oh well. Thanks!

Between LACP, some fiber HBAs and ConnectX2 and ConnectX3 10gb gear I'll piece things together.
Did you ever have any success in your multichannel venture? I would love to hear if you have tried this on Samba 4.4+ current stable is 4.6. Here is my post.

Sorry to pull an old thread to life but no one knows much of anything about multichannel.