The latest Windows enhancement that has been found, in some cases, to negatively impact AoIP performance is SMB-Multichannel. This is actually an enhancement to the SMB networking protocol,
which provides file and print services for computers across multiple platforms.
With the release of SMB 3.0, SMB Multichannel has been turned on by default in Windows server products. The feature has been available (and enabled) on the client side since Windows 8, but it does nothing if there are no connections to a server that implements the feature.
This feature allows for multiple network adapters to participate in file copies in order to speed up transfers. If a client has multiple NICs and there is a route available then both NICs can participate in file transfer with multiple TCP connections, thus getting the file from server to client or vice versa more quickly with a higher apparent throughput than is normally available on the network.
If any computer or other device in your WNIP network has a “leg” in another network such as your office network or a playout system (Wide Orbit, Enco, AudioVault etc) that includes a computer running Windows Server 2012 or newer, it is possible that the server will discover the NICs on your WNIP network such as those on your computers running the Wheatstone AoIP driver. If both the server and client have the SMB Multichannel feature enabled (they are enabled by default on both), the server can take advantage of any NICs it finds in your WNIP network and rope them into file transfer service to enable faster transfers to and from client machines. The additional load of traffic on your audio NICs could be enough to cause dropped packets, thus the detrimental audio artifacts we are trying to avoid, especially with large file transfers.
Thus, the SMB Multichannel feature should be disabled on all of your client machines that run the Wheatnet AoIP driver. It is up to you whether to disable it on the server side, but disabling it on the
client will ensure that the computer will not be asked to participate in this activity.To disable this feature on your client computers running our AoIP driver, start a Windows Powershell
session (simply type the word powershell into the Windows search box and start the Powershell app or ISE) and enter the following command:
Set-SmbClientConfiguration -EnableMultiChannel $false
This will disable the service on the client.