Evaluating SMB2 Performance for Home Directory Workloads

Understanding performance analysis of the home directory workload on file servers can be a complex task in terms of modeling the workload, understanding the bottlenecks, and potentially changing the protocol to improve performance. Utilizing the File Server Capacity Tool (FSCT) from Microsoft to create a realistic workload, this talk will examine the home directory workload in detail to better identify issues for efficient optimization of your client and server implementations. The talk will provide increased insight into the client workloads over the SMB2 protocol, while also providing pointers on how to gather relevant data while running under load. It will also discuss the events used for performance analysis on Windows Server 2008 R2, and then look to how the data gathered can be used to create theoretical models of the effects of future protocol improvements. Finally, we’ll look at how these events could theoretically be exposed to individual clients to allow fine-grained scenario performance evaluation for both enterprise and branch-office workloads.

Learning Objectives

Examine a system for gathering, evaluating, and visualizing performance data across a large number of active connections as is common in the home directory workload.
Understand how the data can be used to create a theoretical model to extrapolate potential performance or scalability gains from future innovations.
Discuss how the core architecture can be extended to allow individual clients to profile their scenarios across a variety of server implementations.