1.6 Applicability Statement

The SMB 2 Protocol<1> is applicable for all scenarios that involve transferring files between client and server. The SMB 2 Protocol is also applicable for inter-process communication between client and server using named pipes.

The SMB 2 Protocol can be more applicable than the SMB Protocol in scenarios that require the following features:

  • Higher scalability of the number of files that a client can open simultaneously, as well as the number of shares and user sessions that servers can maintain.

  • Quality of Service guarantees from the server for the number of requests that can be outstanding against a server at any specified time.

  • Symbolic link support.

  • Stronger end-to-end data integrity protection, using the HMAC-SHA256 algorithm. The HMAC-SHA256 is specified in [FIPS180-4] and [RFC2104].

  • Improved throughput across networks that have disparate characteristics.

  • Improved resilience to intermittent losses of network connectivity.

  • Encryption of client/server traffic when the SMB 3.x dialect family is negotiated.

  • Compression of client/server traffic when the SMB 3.1.1 dialect and a compression algorithm is negotiated.

  • Encryption of RDMA payloads when the SMB 3.1.1 dialect and RDMA transform is negotiated.