[Samba] Running and testing SMB2 under RHEL 5 and RHEL 6

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

Good morning, folks.

I've been driving myself to distraction trying to test out SMB2
performance under Linux. I see that the Samba on RHEL 5 is relatively
old, I'm dealing with an upstream NetApp fileserver that is configured
for SMB2, so I've got clients to test.

The Samba on RHEL 5 is relatively old, 3.0.33, with samba3x-3.5.4
alternatively available, and cifs-utils-* available from RPMforge.
I've done some testing with all of these nad not seen a significant
performance difference simply reading or writing up to 10,000 files  1
MB files in one directory, nor in other test setups, between when the
NetApp has SMB2 enabled or disabled. It certainly has *equivalent*
functionality with SMB2 enabled or disabled on the server side, but
I'm not seeing any difference on the side of the clients.

I also see that RHEL 6 has cifs-utils-4.4, and samba-3.5.4, and a
samba4 package I've not touched. I've done basic tests, but not seen
noticeable differences there, but my testing there is *very* limited:
I don't have test servers close enough to the NetApp to really really
on performance tests not to be blocked by busy VPN's between them.

Does RHEL 5 or RHEL 6, or the current versions of cifs-utils available
for either, actually support SMB2? I don't see a "mount.smb2" binary
in the packages, though I see it mentioned in the docs, and I'd like
to really hammer the SMB2 server for performance comparisons. But it's
meaningless if if it's not actually mounting as SMB2.