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The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) hosted the 10th Storage Developer Conference (SDC) in the Hyatt Regency in beautiful Santa Clara, CA (Silicon Valley) on the week of September 16th 2013. This week, the presentation slides were made publicly available. You can find them all at http...

Introduction This blog post focus on the new SMB Scale-Out Rebalancing introduced in Windows Server 2012 R2. If you haven’t seen it yet, it delivers a new way of balancing file clients accessing a Scale-Out File Server. In Windows Server 2012, each client would be randomly directed via...

Note: This blog post is a Windows Server 2012 R2 update on a previous version focused on Windows Server 2012 . 1. Introduction With the release of Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2, I am frequently asked about how older versions of Windows will behave when connecting to or from these new...

Overview I delivered a demo of Hyper-V over SMB this week at MMS 2013 that’s an evolution of a demo I did back in the Windows Server 2012 launch and also via a TechNet Radio session . Back then I showed a two physical servers running a SQLIO simulation. One played the role of the File...

Question received via e-mail: Is it practical use SMB3 storage without RDMA or do we have a use case for production rather than development or test? I thought RDMA would be essential for production deployment of Hyper-V SMB storage. Answer: RDMA is not a requirement for the Hyper-V over SMB...

1. Introduction If you follow this blog, you probably already had a chance to review the “Hyper-V over SMB” overview talk that I delivered at TechEd 2012 and other conferences. I am now working on a new version of that talk that still covers the basics, but adds brand new segments focused...

This post describes a few different Hyper-V over SMB sample configurations with increasing levels of availability. Not all configurations are recommended for production deployment, since some do not provide continuous availability. The goal of the post is to show how one can add redundancy, Storage Spaces...

Question from a user (paraphrased): When we access a local file via loopback UNC path, is this the same as accessing via the local path? I mean, is "C:\myfolder\a.txt" equal to " \\myserver\myshare\a.txt " or I'll be using TCP/IP in any way? Answer from SMB developer: When accessing files over loopback...

There is a new blog post by Claus Joergensen, a Principal Program Manager in the File Server team, that covers the "VSS for SMB File Shares" feature in Windows Server 2012 and SMB 3.0. Claus covers many details on using VSS for SMB File Shares to create backups, including several scenarios using Hyper...

We had a great time showing Windows Server 2012 at TechEd North America and I wanted to share that the recording for our team’s sessions are now publicly available. That includes our sessions on SMB 3.0 and a number of demos, many of them using one of the Cluster-in-box configurations we were...

This week at TechEd 2011 I will be delivering a presentation about “Windows Server 2008 R2 File Services Consolidation - Technology Update”. If you’re attending the conference in Atlanta-GA, this is session WSV317 on Wednesday at 10:15 AM, plus a repeat on Thursday also at 10:15...

SMB Signing Overview Server Message Block (SMB) is the file protocol most commonly used by Windows. SMB Signing is a feature through which communications using SMB can be digitally signed at the packet level. Digitally signing the packets enables the recipient of the packets to confirm their point...

Scott M. Johnson has published two new blogs post on the Windows Storage Server blog: The first post is a compilation of links covering all kinds of Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 content. http://blogs.technet.com/b/storageserver/archive/2010/11/16/windows-storage-server-2008-r2-references.aspx ...

Note: This post is now obsolete. Please refer to this newer post which includes coverage of SMB 3.0: http://blogs.technet.com/b/josebda/archive/2012/06/06/windows-server-2012-which-version-of-the-smb-protocol-smb-1-0-smb-2-0-smb-2-1-or-smb-3-0-you-are-using-on-your-file-server.aspx I recently...

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is hosting the 7th Storage Developer Conference (SDC) in the Hyatt Regency in beautiful Santa Clara, CA (Silicon Valley) on the week of September 20th. As usual, Microsoft is underwriting the CIFS/SMB/SMB2 Plugfest, which is co-located with the SDC event...

Overview This blog post covers a few different ways to consolidate multiple SMB file servers and keep exposing the consolidated file shares under the old share paths. Scenario Let’s say you currently have 3 file servers named file1.contoso.local, file2.contoso.local and file3.contoso...

Quick blog post to let you know that information about the Best Practices Analyzer (BPA) for Windows Server 2008 R2 File Services has been published. It includes several rules for the configuration, operation, performance and security of the SMB, NFS, DFS-N, DFS-R and FSRM. Get detailed documentation...

The Windows Storage Server Team just released a new 30-page white paper on "Configuring Failover Clusters with Windows Storage Server 2008". This paper will guide you through the process of configuring the networks, domains and clustering features, including performance recommendations for a pair...

There's a new 77-page white paper covering the use of Folder Redirection and Offline Files in a very practical way. Here's an excerpt: "The objective of this white paper is to show through a case study how to use different Microsoft products and technologies to put in place a comprehensive solution...

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is hosting the 6th Storage Developer Conference (SDC) in the Hyatt Regency in beautiful Santa Clara, CA (Silicon Valley) on the week of September 14th. This event is also co-located with the CIFS/SMB/SMB2 Plugfest. For those working with storage technologies...

Overview In this blog post, we’ll cover the basics of the Distributed File System (DFS) in Windows Server 2008, which offers users simplified access to a set of file shares and helps administrators easily maintain the file server infrastructure behind those file shares, including options for load...

The presentations from the SDC 2008 are now publicly available for download. This SNIA event happened in Santa Clara, CA on September 22-25 and the decks are now available to everyone, after being restricted to conference attendees for a few months. Out of the dozens of presentations, I wanted...

SMB (Server Message Block) is the main protocol used in Windows for file sharing and it has been significantly improved from Windows Server 2003/Windows XP to Windows Server 2008/Windows Vista. During my TechEd 2008 ITForum presentation on “Windows Server 2008 – File and Storage Solutions”, I covered...

Overview A recent presentation during SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference described an upcoming tool called “FSCT”. “FSCT” (which stands for “File Server Capacity Tool”) was created by Microsoft after analyzing the workload of production file servers used to store user’s home folders. The tool can...

Next week I will be delivering a presentation on “A CIFS/SMB/SMBV2 File Server Tool for Capacity Planning and Performance Troubleshooting” during SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference in Santa Clara, CA. You can see the agenda and some additional details in the public event agenda at http://www.snia.org...