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The New File Serving Protocol In Windows 2008: SMB 2.0

Tuesday, 22 May 2007 by Michel Roth

Time flies. As I discussed a year ago in my articles on File serving in Server Based Computing environments ( this one and this this one on MSTerminalServices.org and this one on BrianMadden.com) Longhorn and Vista would wield a new version of the Windows file serving protocol: SMB 2.0. Well, it's already here! Supposedly SMB 2.0 is rebuild from the ground up to fix some of the limitations of the SMB protocol in version 1.0. Some of the improvements are: more open files on a server supported as well as a higher number of shares supported. SMB 2.0 has been enhanced to reduce the �chattiness� that makes file sharing on a WAN sometimes painful. Supposedly, with SMB 2.0, Microsoft has shown the ability to download a 300MB file 35 times faster than with SMB 1.0 using a 100 Mbps link (from 24 minutes to 41 seconds). SMB 2.0 will also support transactions, symbolic links and client side encryption.

I for one am hoping that this new protocol also solves some of the scaling problems for File servers in Terminal Server environments. Although I haven't had time to try this out myself thorough enough yet, I think that Windows Server 2008 will not be that much better in fixing these scaling issues for file servers. This is because the services responsible for file serving (Lanmanserver and Lanmanworkstation) are still exactly the same (or at least appear to be). The rumour is that this is because the file serving components of Windows are so old. Think about it: in the earlier versions of Windows (Windows for workgroups) the sole purpose of networking was to share files. Guess what the Windows for workgroup equivalent of a service was called back then? You guessed it: lanmanserver.

Again, time will tell if the scalability of File serving in Windows Server 2008 will be better but I doubt it. There are other enhancements in Windows Server 2008 in terms of storage. Read about it on the Windows Server Division blog.