Testing actual SMB version

1 minute read

Ever since I got employed in my present company, I’ve been told that our NetApp Filer supports SMB2 when used as NAS.
I was always skeptic of that (due to high transfer times and being unable to cancel mid-file) but had no easy way of testing (I guess I could use Network Monitor, but I wasn’t THAT skeptic), but I recently learned that in Windows 8 it’s super easy!
Jose Barreto’s post taught me a little trick:

  1. Open PowerShell as an administrator (on a Windows 8 / Windows Server 2012 machine)
  2. Perform an SMB operation against the file server (my Filer) like this:

    :::powershell
    ls \\Netapp\stupidShare
    
  3. Execute the command Get-SmbConnection, filter for sessions to the file server and look at Dialect:

    :::powershell
    Get-SmbConnection -server Netapp | fl
    

    The result should look like this:

    :::text
    ServerName : Netapp
    ShareName  : stupidShare
    UserName   : Domain\OBA
    Credential : Domain.Domains\OBA
    Dialect    : 1.50
    NumOpens   : 0
    

As you can see, my suspicions were correct! My Windows 8 machine (that definitely supports SMB3 and SMB2) and the NetApp Filer eventually negotiated on SMB1, probably indicating that the Filer doesn’t support SMB2 (at least at the moment).
No one can fool me with SMB versions anymore!

P.S.: Check out Jose’s post for SMB support matrix, version difference and some complex diagram with a raptor (no kidding).