Question SFP+ 10 gig issue

[wttech001]

We have a TEG-30262 Trendnet switch - with 2 SFp+ 10 gig ports. We also have a quad-port Intel 10 gig adapter - Intel X710-DA4 NIC - on a Supermicro - Supermicro X12SPO-NTF- motherboard.
We are running Windows 2019 server. We have two of the Intel ports plugged on the server plugged into the 2 10 gig SFP+ ports on the switch. The cable used to plug in is

10Gtek 10G SFP+ DAC Cable - 10GBASE-CU Passive Direct Attach Copper Twinax SFP Cable for Cisco SFP-H10GB-CU3M, Ubiquiti, D-Link, Supermicro, Netgear, Mikrotik, ZTE Devices, 3m…​

https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B07TLWVNDB?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details&th=1


Windows sees all 4 NICS but says only one is plugged in. All the lights are on at both ends of the connection.

What could be the problem? Do we have to do some bonding/teaming/link aggregation - the switch is a dumb switch so there is no configuration possible on it. Can we use both 10 gig SFP+ ports simultaneously or might one be reserved for connection to another switch?

Also on the one connection that is working properly we are experiencing 3 per cent data loss.

Should we be using a different cable? The distance is 3 meters.

Thanks in advance for your attention to this.

 

[kanewolf]

We have a TEG-30262 Trendnet switch - with 2 SFp+ 10 gig ports. We also have a quad-port Intel 10 gig adapter - Intel X710-DA4 NIC - on a Supermicro - Supermicro X12SPO-NTF- motherboard.
We are running Windows 2019 server. We have two of the Intel ports plugged on the server plugged into the 2 10 gig SFP+ ports on the switch. The cable used to plug in is

10Gtek 10G SFP+ DAC Cable - 10GBASE-CU Passive Direct Attach Copper Twinax SFP Cable for Cisco SFP-H10GB-CU3M, Ubiquiti, D-Link, Supermicro, Netgear, Mikrotik, ZTE Devices, 3m…​

https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B07TLWVNDB?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details&th=1


Windows sees all 4 NICS but says only one is plugged in. All the lights are on at both ends of the connection.

What could be the problem? Do we have to do some bonding/teaming/link aggregation - the switch is a dumb switch so there is no configuration possible on it. Can we use both 10 gig SFP+ ports simultaneously or might one be reserved for connection to another switch?

Also on the one connection that is working properly we are experiencing 3 per cent data loss.

Should we be using a different cable? The distance is 3 meters.

Thanks in advance for your attention to this.

To plug two cables in at the same time, you have to configure the two ports on the host and switch as a LAG group. Otherwise the switch sees the two ports as a loop and disables one of the ports.

 

[bill001g]

You need a switch that supports the bonding.

It all depends on why you want to do this. It will not improve the performance of a single large file transfer it will still be limited to a single cable speed.

Assuming you use the industry standard 802.3ad. This will put all traffic from a single session on the same physically connection. The reason it does this if you were to spray the data over both connection using say a by packet allocation you will get packets out of order. Say you had a stream of data that has a 1500 byte packet followed by 15 100 byte packets. It would start sending the 1500 byte packet on connection 1 and then send the other 15 packets on connection 2. The receive would get at least 14 of the smaller 100 byte packets before it gets the 1500 byte one. The software will think the 1500 byte one got lost and request a retransmisson. In some cases it will drop the session.

To avoid this issue 802.3ad would hold the smaller packets and transmit all the traffic on connection 1.

Now if you are actually using this as a server with many different machines connecting it will mostly use both connections. It uses stuff like ip address and port to select which connection. The pure randomness of these number tends to load balance at very high session counts. It does not though balance by load. It could put 2 connection on the same connection and leave the other idle. It is a stupid math equation that only really work with lots of small sessions. A central web server with lots of users works well.

Port bonding has a very limited use case. It data centers it tends to be used more for redundancy with very fancy switches where you can bond port that go to different physical switches to allow for switch failure or even simple code updates on a switch.

Note there are non standard forms of port bonding, most switches do not support this. They have different options but there is no good way to solve the packet out of order problem. Some methods hold things in buffers to put them back in order on the far end which of course causes tiny delays.