Dell R710 w/ Intel 82576 gigabit NIC (latest Intel drivers). I'm setting up a new Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 & so far I've installed updates & configured the File Services & Web Server (IIS) roles. Windows Advanced Firewall is on (by default), and configuring the roles seemed to activate some rules to allow the web server ports & file sharing.
Problem: I can connect to a test file share fine, but copying large files is abysmally slow. I'm getting ~10MB/s copying to/from a Windows 7 client. The same client can easily get 80-90MB/s to a different file server (so it's not the client). If I disable the firewall, I get full gigabit speeds. If I enable it, it drops down to 10MB/s. I'm using the default firewall settings that are configured when enabling the File Sharing role. Obviously I need to enable others, but which ones?
After further investigation, it seems to be one (or all) of the "Network Discovery" inbound/outbound rules. I noticed Windows enabled these rules on the "Private" profile, but not the "Domain" profile. If I enable them all for the "Domain" profile, the problem goes away. I don't like blindly enabling rules.
I take the above comment back. Enabling "Network Discovery" rules seemed to work briefly, but now it stopped.
Well, this is turning out to be a network problem. Just happened to rear it's ugly head around the same time I brought this server online. I don't think the extra firewall rules I mentioned here are required at all.