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What is the performance impact when enabling SMB Signing?

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Applies to

  • ONTAP 9
  • SMB
  • SMB Signing

Answer

  • When SMB sessions use SMB signing, all SMB communications to and from Windows clients experience a performance impact, which affects both the clients and the server (that is, the nodes on the cluster running the SVM containing the SMB server)
  • The performance impact shows as increased CPU usage on both the clients and the server, although the amount of network traffic does not change

Additional Information

  • SMB signing may interfere with some solutions that by design (for example, WAN accelerators) act as a man in the middle and modify SMB network traffic
  • Performance impact of SMB signing
  • If the performance impact is too large, consider enabling SMB 3 encryption instead for AES-NI enabled storage systems starting in ONTAP 9.7.
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