Dell VNX5800 VNX Series: Introduction to SMB 3.0 Support - Page 13

• Increased bandwidth • Transparent network interface failover • Load balancing When establishing the SMB session, the CIFS server must send the response on the same TCP connection the request arrived on. Once the session has been established, the client sends a request to retrieve the list of interfaces available from the DM and uses the best interface available for I/O. If multiple interfaces are available, the client will open new connections on an as-needed basis. For example, when the pending I/O queue begins growing, the client will open additional connections to improve bandwidth. If the network interface controller (NIC) supports Receive Side Scaling (RSS), multiple TCP connections can be opened on the same NIC and be load balanced across multiple CPU cores. Multiple RSS NICs can be used to support multiple TCP connections on each NIC for a single SMB session. You can run the netstat command on a client to check the number of open TCP connections. As shown in Figure 8, there are two TCP connections on two NICs associated with the SMB session. Figure 8 Multiple TCP connections EMC VNX Series: Introduction to SMB 3.0 Support 13