1.6 Applicability Statement
The SMB 2 Protocol<1> is applicable for all scenarios that involve transferring files between client and server. The SMB 2 Protocol is also applicable for inter-process communication between client and server using named pipes.
The SMB 2 Protocol can be more applicable than the SMB Protocol in scenarios that require the following features:
Higher scalability of the number of files that a client can open simultaneously, as well as the number of shares and user sessions that servers can maintain.
Quality of Service guarantees from the server for the number of requests that can be outstanding against a server at any specified time.
Symbolic link support.
Stronger end-to-end data integrity protection, using the HMAC-SHA256 algorithm. The HMAC-SHA256 is specified in [FIPS180-4] and [RFC2104].
Improved throughput across networks that have disparate characteristics.
Improved resilience to intermittent losses of network connectivity.
Encryption of client/server traffic when the SMB 3.x dialect family is negotiated.
Compression of client/server traffic when the SMB 3.1.1 dialect and a compression algorithm is negotiated.
Encryption of RDMA payloads when the SMB 3.1.1 dialect and RDMA transform is negotiated.