NIC Teaming TP-Link

[sg4rb0]

Hi,

I want to setup NIC teaming on my two network cards. They are TP-Link TG-3468 interfaces. Can someone please tell me how to do it from the PC's perspective (It is running Windows 7). I know how to configure LACP on my switch, so I don't need advise on that.

Thanks

 

[bill001g]

With windows 7 you need the nic drivers themselves to support it. Microsoft only supports it in the server versions...or at the last time I looked.

A quick search of those cards say they do not support 802.3ad which is the basis for LACP bonded ports. You might be able to load a different driver, unfortunately this takes a lot of digging since tiny difference in part numbers change the support.

Generally unless you really have a server that is providing services to many different users and has a very fast disk subsystem you will not see much advantage to bonding ports. There always seems to be some bottleneck well before you even max a single gig port out.

 

[sg4rb0]

With windows 7 you need the nic drivers themselves to support it. Microsoft only supports it in the server versions...or at the last time I looked.

A quick search of those cards say they do not support 802.3ad which is the basis for LACP bonded ports. You might be able to load a different driver, unfortunately this takes a lot of digging since tiny difference in part numbers change the support.

Generally unless you really have a server that is providing services to many different users and has a very fast disk subsystem you will not see much advantage to bonding ports. There always seems to be some bottleneck well before you even max a single gig port out.

Hmm, I wonder if I can take a bunch of dynamic disks (in a spanned volume) that are separated from the disk with the MBR record on, put them on a new windows 2012 server and keep themselves spanned. Do you know if this is possible?

For now I think I'll just buy a 3560 with GB ports if team-nic'ing isn't an option. Only reason I wanted to do it in the first place is because I've got little raspberry pi's running xmbc around the house streaming movies from my nas. Problem is, I measured the bandwidth utilization for a single 1080p stream and it takes up around 7MB of data. On a 100Mbit port, that' leaves me only like 5MB of capacity, so the second video stream from my NAS ends up lagging. I will just upgrade my switch.

 

[bill001g]

You are always better off using a faster ports than combining nics. I thought you were combining gig ports. Even then it many times is better to go to 10g.

The main issue with port bonding is it does not load balance by packet it load balances in best case by ip and port. So a single session will always use the same path. A second session may or may not use the same path. It is not picked by load...for example all even ip on one and all odd ip on the other. You tend to get inconstant results so you need to leave a lot of extra. In your case you could get very unlucky and all the machines could all use the same 100m port.