Storage Developer Conference

The SMB3 ecosystem continues to grow with the introduction of new clients and server products, a growing deployment base, and new generations of networking technologies. This talk covers the changes to the SMB3 protocol in Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016, the design considerations, and how the changes will affect both protocol implementers and customers. The challenges and performance of multi-vendor, switched dual NIC 100Gb RDMA will be presented for the first time.

Like passengers on a long car ride, the one question on everyone's mind regarding Samba and SMB3 is, "Are we there yet?"

This talk will take you on a tour of how Samba will go from its current nominal support of SMB3 to more comprehensive support of SMB3. You will be given an overview of Samba's architecture, design, and the implementation status of key SMB3 features including Witness, Multichannel, SMB Direct, and Persistent Handles.

By the end, you will know exactly where we are and how far we have to go.

Learning Objectives

Current status of SMB3 support in Samba
Architecture and design of SMB3 features in Samba
Challenges faced during the implementation of SMB3 in Samba so far
The roadmap for SMB3 support in Samba going forward

Server platforms differ from a low-end NAS solution to a high-end storage. All of them require an SMB server solution, although. Such a solution, to serve all of them, must be highly customizable. We will discuss the methods of SMB Server parameterization to meet the wide range of requirements. This discussion will emphasize on both instrumentation and performance figures. A special topic will be dedicated to measuring SMB performance over RDMA.

Learning Objectives

SMB3 server implementation
SMB scalability
SMB performance
SMB over RDMA

Microsoft Azure has provided REST endpoints for blobs, tables, and queues since its inception. This is an efficient and simple stateless storage API for new applications. However, there is a very large installed base of mature applications, especially enterprise and vertical, which are written to a conventional file API such as Win32 or the C run-times. Azure File Service provides [MS-SMB2] compliant file shares with the same high availability as Azure’s REST endpoints since the backing store for both transient handle state and files data is, under the hood, Azure tables and blobs. As a bonus, the file share namespace is also exposed via REST, allowing simultaneous and coherent access to file data from both endpoints. This talk will relate the experience and challenges of designing and implementing a wire compliant continuously available SMB server where the backing store is not even a conventional file system, let alone NTFS.

Learning Objectives

Learn how an SMB sever can be built on top of something other than a conventional file system.
Gain an appreciation of the complexities involved in durably committing what is usually considered volatile handle state which must be both highly available and high performance.
Be inspired by the possibilities of immediately running existing applications unmodified against the cloud while simultaneously leveraging REST access to the application’s data.

The implementation of advanced SMB3 features is a broad and important set of topics on the Samba roadmap. One of these SMB3 features that is currently being actively worked on is Multi-Channel, a kind of channel bonding at the SMB level intended to increase both performance and fault-tolerance of SMB sessions. It is not only one of the most generally useful features of SMB3 but also a prerequisite for enabling RDMA as a transport for SMB with SMB Direct.

This talk will provide details about the current project to finish the implementation of SMB3 Multi-Channel in Samba, explaining the challenges for development and how they are solved. The presentation will include demos. The talk will conclude with a brief outlook how SMB Direct support can be added to Samba.

Learning Objectives

Refresher on Multi-Channel
State of implementation of Multi-Channel in Samba
Challenges for Samba to implement Multi-Channel
Design of Multi-Channel in Samba
Outlook to SMB Direct support

Samba components have to talk to each other. One of the original requirements for messaging are oplock breaks: One smbd has to tell another smbd to give up an oplock. This used to be done via local UDP packets until it was converted to use a general, tdb-based messaging API. The Samba4 effort by Tridge implemented messaging on top of local unix domain datagram sockets. Samba 4.2 has a new implementation of this concept.

Meanwhile ctdb provides clusterwide messaging, using a central daemon per cluster node which is aware of the cluster configuration.

The talk will describe the various implementations in detail, their strengths and weaknesses. It will also describe possible future developments for high-performance local and clusterwide messaging. It will give Samba implementors an overview of a critical piece of the Samba architecture and where it is headed.

Learning Objectives

Learn about Samba architecture
Find out about Samba clustering directions
Get insight about Samba performance and scalability improvements

An SMB3 File Server is not complete without the Witness service. Samba is currently developing support for this DCE/RPC service that allows for Continuous Availability (CA), a much more robust, fine-grained and seamless mechanism for client failover in clustered environments. This talk will outline the current implementation within Samba, the relationship with CTDB, challenges faced in development, and the planned integration with other projects like the CIFS kernel client and Pacemaker. This talk will also include a live demonstration showcasing the Witness infrastructure, it's role in CA, and how it can be controlled from a remote application.

Learning Objectives

How Witness works and what it does
How to achieve a seamless file sharing experience for SMB3 clients
How to deal programmatically with failover in clustered Samba environments

EMC Isilon OneFS operating system powers a file system that scales to more than twenty petabytes of data in a single namespace. Transparent failover capabilities of SMB 3.0 are very attractive to provide continuous. non-disruptive availability of this data to the users. However as one can imagine, there are many challenges to build this capability into the scale out architecture of this magnitude. We want to share the approach we took, and challenges we overcame in the process.

Learning Objectives

Fundamentals of SMB 3.0 failover
Configuration options to fit workloads running non-server application data
Isilon implementation of SMB 3.0 failover, and challenges overcome"

Samba is becoming the product of choice to gateway local SMB file-based access to cloud storage. This talk will cover how this can be achieved, and the potential problems, pitfalls and solutions in designing such a product. I will present a design for architecting such a solution inside Samba.