Server Message Block, or SMB, has been the default file
sharing protocol in Windows for, again, as long as I've been in the industry,
Windows Server 2022 continues to enhance Server Message Block
version 3 and Server Message Block Direct.
Now the use case for SMB Direct is speed.
That is, as long as the servers who are communicating with each other,
I'm going to say Windows Server 2022 boxes, have a hardware network interface
that supports remote direct memory access, or RDMA, the use case is the
acceleration that you can see in the CPU overhead is so low that the use case
is you can connect with another server's RDMA‑enabled NIC and interact with
their storage as if it's locally mounted.
So, again, SMB Direct built‑in feature,
it's enabled by default in Windows Server, and as long as your NICs,
your network interfaces, are RDMA enabled as well,
you can realize great performance gains in the
networking subsystem in Windows Server.
And then lastly, in Windows Server 2022, SMB Direct offers
128 or 256‑bit AES packet encryption.
Last thing, you should know a couple final points before we proceed, is
that SMB Multichannel is the Microsoft product that's responsible for
Windows Server detecting the RDMA state of its own NICs, as well as remote
NICs that that Windows Server is communicating with, and you should also
know that in the case of Hyper‑V, the SMB Direct feature is not exposed to your Hyper‑V guests, that is the VMs. This would be only at the hardware level.