Maximize bandwidth from server, teaming....

N

nekrosoft13

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jan 4, 2005
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Trying to get the most bandwidth from the server.

right now I have dual Intel NIC, and simple netgear switch, running the Intel NICs in a team with static load balancing mode I believe ( will check later and update)

was thinking about buying quad intel NIC later, but I believe the switch still coudd be the weak point, what switch would work well with teaming?
 
Perhaps you can tell us that you're trying to achieve in the end? What application etc you're using....
//Danne
 
What switch? What budget? You could add a 10 Gb sfp to the switch and NIC To the server?
 
this is for home media server running windows server 2012 r2.

right now i'm using a cheap netgear prosafe 8 port gigabit switch, and Intel dual NIC with teaming enabled in intel drivers.

server can be streaming media content to up to 4 devices running XBMC at the same time.

I was thinking about getting a intel quad nic and setup a teaming on that, but I might need a new switch as well, because the netgear I'm currently using doesn't support teaming (LACP) officially.

what 16 port switch would be recommended, nothing to crazy expensive, 10Gp switch is out of budget.
 
Given what you've described, even if your content is at 100mbit/sec, you're not even saturating a single GBE link. Therefore, to me, any further investment in networking bandwidth would not yield any tangible benefits to you...
 
Dude Server 2012 R2 has built in NIC teaming, SMB 3.0 and also supports MPIO over a team should you need it. Remove the damn Intel Drivers, team that shit in server manager and call it a day.
 
I tried that before, by doing that it somehow caused a delay in server response.

When each XMBC PC would connect to the PC for first time (once a day or so) it would take 1-2 minutes before server would start streaming, but then it would work fine for rest of a day, until host was restarted.
 
David_Schroth said:
Given what you've described, even if your content is at 100mbit/sec, you're not even saturating a single GBE link. Therefore, to me, any further investment in networking bandwidth would not yield any tangible benefits to you...
Click to expand...

streaming blu-ray rips will saturate the link, and at the same time I might be transfering data from and to the server, single GBE link is not enough.
 
You're doing something really wrong then...
BDs are about 50mbit tops
//Danne
 
nekrosoft13 said:
streaming blu-ray rips will saturate the link, and at the same time I might be transfering data from and to the server, single GBE link is not enough.
Click to expand...

What math are you using to arrive at your conclusion?

Using one of my Blu-ray rips as an example, here's my math:

Length: 2 hours (7200 seconds)
Size: 35GByte (280Gbit)

280/7200 = 0.03888 Gbit/sec

0.03888 * 1000 = 38.88 Mbit/sec

For fun:

1 / 0.03888 = 25.7 simultaneous bluray rips to saturate a 1Gbit link. (of course, I didn't factor in reducing by ~20% for TCP overhead.... but there seems to be room to spare with only 4 clients)
 
If you are running out of bandwidth streaming Blu-Rays I would be looking at if the disks can keep up not the network.

Or if your team is actually helping you... I run into disk contention way before network issues.
 
ok, maybe I didn't make my point clear,

streaming blu-ray rips will saturate the link, and at the same time I might be transfering data from and to the server, single GBE link is not enough.
Click to expand...

what I meant to say by that is that I can stream blu-ray to those 4 clients, but some times at the same time I might want to transfer 100+GB from or to the server and when that happens streaming to the clients can choke.

Thats why I was looking at options to maximize bandwidth, by getting quad nic and better switch with LACP, just not sure which one.

i'm getting better performance with Intel NICs and drivers, then trying to use teaming build in server 2012 r2 (unless I didn't configure server teaming correctly)
 
In which case. Just use one of the ports (one IP) for XBMC and the other(s) for everything else.
 
It's amazing how people want to over complicate even the simplest of setups....
 
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