Hi Sean, There is a great explenation by Bob Combs and Jose Barreto on Channel9 from TechEd 2012. You can check it here. Jose has created a written version of the presentation here. These should provide more insight into the inner workings of SMB 3 Multichannel and LBFO. Kind Regards, Marc van Eijk

Marc, I had reviewed Jose's post a while ago but forgot about it. Thanks for the pointer.

I am working to configure a Windows 2012 Storage Cluster which will service a number of Windows 2012 systems, each system and cluster host has a dual-port 10gbe adapter. As I have been going along I have been benchmarking the storage performance, both local access and from remote/SMB 3 connections. Yesterday, I built-out my SSD based storage pool. The local access IO performance number are, I had hoped, fantastic. The remote/SMB performance numbers, however, are just OK (running 40% of the local numbers, capped at about 5gb/s) -- so, I suspect they are limited by the NIC connection speed. So, I started looking at setting up NIC Teaming, in the hopes that I can get better performance, but I am stumped as to which Teaming Mode and/or Load Balancing settings should be used to get maximum performance between 2 SMB nodes. In essence, I am not sure how SMB multichannel traffic presents itself to the storage host; a single TCP connection, using 1 porta multiple TCP connection, each using a separate port Thanks to all for any info provided.