Windows Server 2012 R2 features SMB 3.0, not just for storage, but also for Live Migration. In a converged network/fabric scenario we need to be able to distinguish between the different kinds of SMB 3.0 traffic to ensure that, for example, Live Migration does not choke off storage on a host.
This is possible thanks to a new feature called SMB Bandwidth Limit. You can add this feature in Server Manager.
You can also add this feature via PowerShell:
Install-WindowsFeature FS-SMBBW
From there, we can use Set-SMBBandwidthLimit to set a Bytes Per Second limitation on three different kinds of SMB traffic:
- Default
- VirtualMachine
- LiveMigration
For example, I could run the following to limit the bandwidth of Live Migration. The minimum speed limit is used in this example, which is roughly 0.8 Gbps:
Set-SMBBandwidthLimit -Category LiveMigration -BytesPerSecond 1048576
Get-SMBBandwidthLimit will return the results and Remove-SMBBandwidthLimit will remove the limiter.
The updated PowerShell help in the preview release of WS2012 R2 has not got much information on these cmdlets yet.