SMB Remote File Protocol (Including SMB 3.0) (2014)

The SMB protocol has evolved over time from CIFS to SMB1 to SMB2, with implementations by dozens of vendors including most major Operating Systems and NAS solutions. The SMB 3.0 protocol, announced at the SNIA SDC Conference in September 2011, is expected to have its first commercial implementations by Microsoft, NetApp and EMC by the end of 2012 (and potentially more later). This SNIA Tutorial describes the basic architecture of the SMB protocol and basic operations, including connecting to a share, negotiating a dialect, executing operations and disconnecting from a share. The second part of the talk will cover improvements in the version 2.0 of the protocol, including a reduced command set, support for asynchronous operations, compounding of operations, durable and resilient file handles, file leasing and large MTU support. The final part of the talk covers the latest changes in the SMB 3.0 version, including persistent handles (SMB Transparent Failover), active/active clusters (SMB Scale-Out), multiple connections per sessions (SMB Multichannel), support for RDMA protocols (SMB Direct), snapshot-based backups (VSS for Remote File Shares) opportunistic locking of folders (SMB Directory Leasing), and SMB encryption. Learning Objectives Understand the basic architecture of the SMB protocol Enumerate the main capabilities introduced with SMB 2.0 Describe the main capabilities introduced with SMB 3.0