SMB 2.0 - Next Generation CIFS Protocol in Data ONTAP

Server Message Block (SMB) 2.0 is the next version of the Common Internet File System (CIFS)/SMB protocol. CIFS can also be considered as SMB 1.0. This paper describes the SMB 2.0 features, configuration details, and its implementation in Data ONTAP 7.3.1. This paper also describes SMB 2.0 benefits over CIFS (SMB 1.0), deployment use cases, best practices, and tools to diagnose and capture SMB 2.0 information. Note that CIFS and SMB refer to the same protocol version, and these two terms are being used interchangeably as CIFS (SMB 1.0) in this paper.