SMB

Overview

The Load DynamiX’s SMB / CIFS 3.0 Protocol Testing Solutionallows storage, development and QA engineers to build complex workloads that represent real product environments, emulating clients or servers acting as clients at high scale.

SMB also known as Common Internet File System (CIFS) operates as an application-layer network protocol mainly used for providing shared access to files and miscellaneous communications between nodes on a network.

Load DynamiX supports all SMB versions and dialects including 1.0, 2.002, 2.1, 3.0.x, and 3.1.1 (via TDE) specification.

Details

Full-featured testing of the SMB 3.0 protocol

Figure: The SMB toolkit allows test engineers to use SMB, SMB2 and SMB3 dialects in a single test.

Client Emulation/Realism

Configurable network options supporting VLAN tagging, IPv4, IPv6 and MAC address assignment with increment schemes for emulation of millions of unique clients.
Key authentication mechanisms including NTLMv1/v2 and Kerberos.
SMB 3.0 Signing

Multichannel/Performance

Ability to emulate multichannel scenarios to contrast performance gains when using different number of channels and mixed network interfaces speeds.
Use credit, compound request, thread block and async block constructs for validation of SMB multiplexing and asynchronous behavior.

Offload/Client Caching

Server-side copy and copy offload commands to assess performance gains and traffic reduction improvements of these operations.
Configure emulated clients to use file/directory leasing with various oplocks to understand client caching synchronization behavior, assess increases in file server scalability and reduction in network bandwidth consumption.

Failover/High Availability

Make use of application instance IDs to validate if SMB 3.0 file servers can maintain context when applications failover to different client nodes.
Configure persistent/durable handles to test transparent client recovery of SMB 3.0 under negative conditions such as network or server failures.