Specifications

Best Practices for Virtualizing and Managing Exchange 2013
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Best Practices and Recommendations
SMB Direct works with SMB Multichannel to transparently provide exceptional performance and
failover resiliency when multiple RDMA links between clients and SMB file servers are detected.
Also, because RDMA bypasses the kernel stack, it does not work with Network Interface Card (NIC)
Teaming, but does work with SMB Multichannel (because SMB Multichannel is enabled at the
application layer).
Customers with existing investments in enterprise-class storage arrays that support the SMB 3.0
protocol can connect these arrays directly to the Hyper-V hosts and use them to store the virtual
disks (and data) of key applications and workloads.
Loopback configurations are not supported by Hyper-V when the file server is configured on the
host where the virtual machines are running.
The ESG Lab tested the SMB 3.0 protocol by using an online transaction processing (OLTP) workload
application to simulate the activity of SQL Server users (Figure 14).
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The goal was to demonstrate the
performance, scalability, and efficiency of the SMB protocol, Hyper-V hypervisor, and SQL Server database
engine on cost-effective commodity hardware.
A database of 3,000 customers was configured within each of eight SQL Server virtual machines, with a
goal of achieving linear scalability for the number of transactions per second as the number of
consolidated SQL Server virtual machines increased. The transactions per second and average response
time were monitored as the number of customers and virtual machines increased.
Figure 14: Workload scalability with SMB 3.0 and SQL Server
As shown in the graph, as the number of Hyper-V virtual machines increased, the number of transactions
per second increased, while recorded average transaction response times were manageably low—even
though the virtual machines and respective databases resided on remote file servers accessed using SMB
3.0. The full report and further details are available here.