I know its an oxymoron talking about WAN and performance in the same sentence, however looking at a CIFS server being written to from a remote ( WAN ) client, a couple of things;
1. Can I determine if the session is SMB 1,2,2.1 or 3 ?
2. If it is SMB 3, and there is a single NIC on the VNX on the WAN network, how can I confirm that it is supporting multiple parallel tcp/ip sessions to speed up data transfer ? I Have read about Receive Side Scaling (RSS), but on looking at
alas BranchCache will not resolve the issue, as the remote servers being used are quite sensitive to performance degrading issues. Our concern is when we compare a windows CIFS cluster against a VNX, the performance of the windows cluster is very significently better. Our understanding is the we are seeing the main difference in the TCP/IP stack, which leads us to ask is there a CIFS WAN performance tuning document somewhere ?
I have the same issue. Did you solve the performance problem? Have done some testing against VNX and Windows server through the WAN and we almost double the performance with the Windows file Server. It seems to be that is needed some tuning with congestion control and TCP Window scaling.
its fine in a LAN environment, but do a Proof of Concept before commiting to a WAN environment. CIFS is not engineered to work optimally in a WAN environment and branchcache etc are engineering ways of reducing the impact, but its plaster ( although a nicely designed plaster ) to the problem.
cadencep45
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Posted July 16th, 2014 07:00
ok, I have figured out the first part;
running server_cifs server_2 -option audit,full | grep SMB
will give me that. So the question that is outstanding is there CIFS WAN Specific optimization that can be done, assuming a SMB 2.1 client.