nic teaming 1 switch + router

[chris mallia]

Hi I have windows server 2012 and I am thinking of plugging a second gigabit network card and nic team them which will add up to 2 gigabits. My question is I have 4 port switch and 1 router, if I plug the network cards to the switch than plug the router to the same switch running 1 cat6 from switch to router, will that 1 cat6 running from switch to router be a bottleneck for devices plugged in the router? by the way router has 4 gigabit ports

 

[bill001g]

You of course will be limited to 1g but that is not your problem.

You cannot run nic teaming which is also called port bonding or link aggregation on a unmanned switch. Even on managed switches you need the feature 802.3ad.

Now lets assume you mange to get the correct equipment and get it configured correctly. This does not actually increase the bandwidth for a single pair of machines. This is more of a load balancer than true port bonding. If you would have 2 machine talking to your server in theory each could use 1g but neither machine can use more by itself. The key feature it does not have is called load balance by packet.

Still it is likely your server cannot produce even 1g of data unless it is a true server designed as such. The simplest bottleneck you will find is that hard drives cannot produce data that fast and there are many many other bottlenecks in the systems unless they are designed to be high speed network attached servers.

 

[chris mallia]

You of course will be limited to 1g but that is not your problem.

You cannot run nic teaming which is also called port bonding or link aggregation on a unmanned switch. Even on managed switches you need the feature 802.3ad.

Now lets assume you mange to get the correct equipment and get it configured correctly. This does not actually increase the bandwidth for a single pair of machines. This is more of a load balancer than true port bonding. If you would have 2 machine talking to your server in theory each could use 1g but neither machine can use more by itself. The key feature it does not have is called load balance by packet.

Still it is likely your server cannot produce even 1g of data unless it is a true server designed as such. The simplest bottleneck you will find is that hard drives cannot produce data that fast and there are many many other bottlenecks in the systems unless they are designed to be high speed network attached servers.

Thank you very much you covered everything that I needed, as for hdd did I get it right? if a hdd max speed is 1.2gb/s Aldo I have 2 network card they still cant give example 1g to pc1 and 1g to pc2 cos the drive is limited to 1.2g I manage to get full gigabit transfer speed from my server. So will it make any difference if i use nic teaming for load balance

 

[bill001g]

You could likely get say 600m to each machine for a total of 1.2 but that is assuming you can really get 1.2g off the drive using normal file systems. It would only be in a very special case like they run in the benchmarks. You have to remember it is not common for it to say read 100g of data at a time. Most times it is reading single sectors to get the filename , date, lastupdate or whatever. There is a lot of overhead built into the file system.

I suspect you can not get 1.2g off the drive except in very special cases so your 1g network is likely still faster than the drive.

 

[chris mallia]

You could likely get say 600m to each machine for a total of 1.2 but that is assuming you can really get 1.2g off the drive using normal file systems. It would only be in a very special case like they run in the benchmarks. You have to remember it is not common for it to say read 100g of data at a time. Most times it is reading single sectors to get the filename , date, lastupdate or whatever. There is a lot of overhead built into the file system.

I suspect you can not get 1.2g off the drive except in very special cases so your 1g network is likely still faster than the drive.

Hi thank you so much for your help last transfer I did from my server to my PC I got 112 MB/S, I copies movies via samba what do you think?

 

[bill001g]

If you want to increase the speed try to turn on jumbo frames and see what happens. This reduces the overhead in the data stream. Only bad thing is everything on you lan must support jumbo frames or you will end up having to turn it off. Most routers and dumb switches support this. Set the MTU a small amount at a time sometimes it get worse if you set it too high.

This may increase your transfer speed