I have been evaluating SMB3 and I have to say that it really eliminates the need to spend a fortune on shared storage.
Gone.
With automatic RDMA, I get low-latency fault-tolerant shared storage for a tenth of the price. This.is.wonderful.
With my SANs coming up on 5 years, I have to say that I will adopt SMB3 unless VMware rolls out an alternative. Does pNFS have a comparable feature set? I can't tell because all of the documentation is arcane, baroque mumbo-jumbo.
Hyper-V isn't quite there yet but SMB3 makes it a no-brainer for my low-performance, unsexy situation. But I certainly don't want to do that migration if vSphere/ESXi is going to compete to this end (surely they can do better than Microsoft, yes?).