Microsoft created an update to the SMB protocol with the release of Microsoft Windows 8 and Server 2012 operating systems. This new version is officially known as SMB3, but in some early documentation it might be referred to as SMB2.2.

The following new features included in SMB3 are relevant to your SteelHead deployment:

You can use all three features only if the client and server are Windows 8 and Windows 2012 servers respectively. If the client is Windows 7 or earlier, or the server is Server 2008-R2 or earlier, the client and server do not use the new features for reasons of backward compatibility—with the exception of secure dialect negotiation.

Secure dialect negotiation is enabled and used by default in Windows 8 and Server 2012 connections. You can optionally use secure dialect negotiation with SMB2 when you are setting up a connection to a server running Server 2008-R2, but this is not normally enabled, for compatibility reasons.

With the release of Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2, Microsoft has added support for SMB3.02.

For SMB3 and SMB3.02 specifications, go to http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc246482.aspx.

RiOS prior to v8.5 provides some limited optimization of SMB3, but in some cases, there is no optimization at all. For more information about SMB3 and releases prior to RiOS v8.5, go to https://supportkb.riverbed.com/support/index?page=content&id=S16547.

In RiOS v8.5 or later, you can provide full optimization for signed SMB3 traffic between Windows 8 clients and Server 2012 servers, as well as other client-server combinations that result in the use of signed SMB3 traffic.

Additionally, in RiOS v8.5 or later, you can optimize SMB3 traffic that is encrypted at the file share or file server level.

To optimize SMB3 traffic, you must run RiOS v8.5 or later on both the client-side and server-side SteelHeads, and join the server-side SteelHead to the domain. Additionally, you must enable SMB3 optimization on both the client-side and server-side SteelHeads.

If you correctly configure the SteelHeads to optimize signed SMB3 traffic, there is no additional configuration required to support the optimization of signed SMB3 traffic that is encrypted at the share or server level.

For more information about the configuration settings required for SMB3, see the SteelHead Management Console User’s Guide. For information about optimizing traffic between Windows 8.1 and Server 2012R2, go to https://supportkb.riverbed.com/support/index?page=content&id=S23689.