Freigeben über

SMB3 PowerShell changes in Windows Server 2012 R2: SMB Bandwidth Limits

  • Artikel

Introduction 

Windows Server 2012 R2 introduced a new version of SMB. Technically it’s SMB version 3.02, but we continue to call it just SMB3. The main changes are described at https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831474.aspx.

With this new release, we made a few changes in SMB PowerShell to support the new scenarios and features. This includes a few new cmdlets and some changes to existing cmdlets, with extra care not break any of your existing scripts.

This blog post outlines one of the 7 set of changes related to SMB PowerShell in Windows Server 2012 R2.

 

SMB Bandwidth Limits

 

Starting with Windows Server 2012 R2, administrators can set a bandwidth limit for one or more categories by using simple PowerShell cmdlets. They can also query the limit for each category.  

 

There are 3 categories of traffic that can be limited:

  • VirtualMachine: Hyper-V over SMB traffic. This limit can only be applied on Hyper-V hosts.

  • LiveMigration: Hyper-V Live Migration over SMB traffic. This limit can only be applied on Hyper-V hosts.

  • Default: All other types of SMB traffic. This limit can be applied on any SMB client.

 

A category limit is an absolute value expressed in bytes per second.  For example, a category limit of 500MB means the total throughput for this category should not exceed 500 megabytes per second.

 

Installing the new feature and performance counters

 

Before you can use Bandwidth Limits, the feature needs to be enabled.  For that, you should use the following PowerShell cmdlet:

  • Add-WindowsFeature FS-SMBBW

 

A new SMB Performance counter set with an instance per category becomes available after you install the feature.  The performance counters in for this set will use the same counters used today for the SMB Client Shares counter.

 

New SmbBandwidthLimit cmdlets

 

The PowerShell cmdlets used to manage SMB Bandwidth Limits are:

  • Get-SmbBandwidthLimit [ –Category {Default/VirtualMachine/LiveMigration} ]

  • Set-SmbBandwidthLimit –Category {Default/VirtualMachine/LiveMigration} –BytesPerSecond x

  • Remove-SmbBandwidthLimit –Category {Default/ VirtualMachine/LiveMigration}

 

PowerShell allows us to specify units like KB, MB, GB after the number of bytes when specifying the BytesPerSecond parameter.

The Set-SmbBandwidthLimit cmdlet won’t accept a BytesPerSecond parameter smaller than 1MB (1048576).

 

Note

 

This blog post is an updated version of the September 2013 post at  https://blogs.technet.com/b/josebda/archive/2013/09/03/what-s-new-in-smb-powershell-in-windows-server-2012-r2.aspx focused on a single topic.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    August 12, 2014
    Guys, would be nice to see a bandwidth limit per session and per session/share.
  • Anonymous
    March 21, 2017
    add-windowsfeature FS-SMBBW command does not work on nano server and the feature is not installed by default.any idea how i do SMB Bandwidth limits on nano or if its even supported?thanks