Does ONTAP have a single counter manager to track all the CIFS SMB versions used by the NAS clients
Applies to
- All FAS/AFF systems connected to CIFS clients which supports all versions of SMB.
Answer
- Currently there is no way to track the SMB client versions using counter manager statistics.
- The following (diag) commands can be used to track respective SMB version connections from the CIFS object.
- Although these counts are not accurate for SMB version 1.
::*> statistics show-periodic -object cifs:vserver -counter smb3_connections_count -instance <vserver_name> ::*> statistics show-periodic -object cifs:vserver -counter smb2_1_connections_count -instance <vserver_name> ::*> statistics show-periodic -object cifs:vserver -counter smb2_connections_count -instance <vserver_name> ::*> statistics show-periodic -object cifs:vserver -counter smb1_connections_count -instance <vserver_name>
- The SMB protocol negotiates protocol-specific options using the SMB_COM_NEGOTIATE request and response messages.
- The client will send its supported version and options to the CIFS server. '
- The server will respond with the highest commonly supported version.
- This SMB_COM_NEGOTIATE is counted as a connection count for SMB1 , whereas the client might have actually negotiated and connected via a higher dialect.
- Hence , there is a discrepancy in those values with the actual SMB1 connection count.
- No further enhancements are done for SMB1 counter manager as Microsoft has announced that it is deprecating SMB 1 and will be disabling it, by default, in a future version of Windows Server.
- The only way to track clients still using SMB 1 is by referencing the following counter, which tracks the (SMB_COM_NEGOTIATE) from any client which supports SMB1.
::*> statistics show-periodic -object smb1 -counter established_sessions -instance <vserver_name>
- However, this counter is only available for SMB1.
- All other SMB versions SMB(2/2.1/3) are aggregated under SMB2.
- There is no current mechanism to track established sessions for SMB2 ,SMB2.1 and SMB3 separately.
Additional Information
- RFE(Request for Enhancement): 1278116 has been raised to NetApp Engineering to have the ability to track SMB2/SMB2.1/SMB3 sessions via counter manager.
- Reference: SMB Protocol Best Practices ONTAP 9.x