Help me understand what I need for Port Teaming on Home Network

[Sonicmojo]

I am in the process of building a new home server that will serve as file server, media stash central, housing workstation backups etc etc. It's built on a nice Supermicro board that features dual NIC capability.

I would like to be able to use both NICS in a "port teaming" scenario which I believe requires a "managed" switch to do properly (if at all).

The current layout has a 16 port (un-managed) Dlink switch in the main rack which then hits a 11 port patch bay which goes to a smaller 8 port Dlink (un-managed) switch in the electrical room which finally connects to my ASUS router.

Given the above "unmanaged" scenario - what would I need to drop/replace/buy to allow correct operation of the dual NIC in the server to attain the additional bandwidth/redundancy that should be possible and be in a position to use other dual NIC boxes in the future?

I am assuming both unmanaged switches may need to be changed out.

Thoughts?

Sonic.

 

[System Error Message]

For port teaming you first need an OS that supports it and a semi managed switch that supports it. Only the switch to the NIC needs to be managed but with your network that would create a bottleneck so you will also need to team the ports between the switches if you have multiple devices both sides or a switch with a faster interface for connecting.

 

[Zhiki4]

Hi, i assume that the reason for teaming the NICs is higher bandwidth. As far as i know you have the option in some OS to build teaming with unmanaged switches (Windows Server 2012) . If your OS do not offer this feature you can use smart managed or managed switch and LACP, where the link utilization will depend on the the load balancing algorithm. I.e. Cisco SG220 small business switch use load balance based on source and destination MAC address, or source and destination MAC/IP. Have you considered 10G NICs and appropriate switch?

 

[thiggins]

First understand what port teaming / aggregation will and won't do for you.
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/lanwan/lanwan-howto/30556-how-to-set-up-switch-link-aggregation

This presentation is linked in the article. Worth a read.

http://ieee802.org/3/hssg/public/apr07/frazier_01_0407.pdf

Bottom line is port aggregation doesn't increase bandwidth for individual clients.

 

[coxhaus]

It adds a complexity not really needed for home use. If you have a GIG pipe to the internet then I would consider it.

 

[System Error Message]

i would say its not complex. you can get 10Gbe/SFP+ cheap if you need 10G but when you get a switch for teaming make sure it supports the right type of teaming. Windows server would support it but windows vista and above will not allow it.

it can however increase bandwidth for individual clients if both the server and client are both using teaming. Its good for a variety of things and in some ways allows some applications to work while you're doing something heavy like file transfers. So if you had a game running and transferred a file teaming would mean 1 link gets fully used so the game doesnt get interrupted.

 

[coxhaus]

So if you had a game running and transferred a file teaming would mean 1 link gets fully used so the game doesnt get interrupted.

This could be a true statement. I don't know of any games maintaining 1 GIG of through put. More than likely you will still have room for back ground transfers with one GIG connection. If you had a game running using more than 1 link, 2 links, 3 links or even 4 links then the statement could be false.

 

[System Error Message]

its not the game using 1G throughput, its when say a file transfer uses 1G throughput it would cause lags on the game server on a single NIC without the use of any layer 2 QoS.

Without QoS i noticed if im downloading and loading a video at the same time the video buffers. This would apply to LAN when it comes to gigabit throughput. So teaming does really help if your application/situation calls for it other than multiple clients.

 

[coxhaus]

Teaming helps if you are maintaining more than 1 GIG of traffic. That is what it was designed for. Most home networks don't maintain that level of traffic in a home network. A once in a while file transfer doesn't warrant add Teaming every where. As you add switches then the switches all need to be Teamed also or they become a bottle neck. Microsoft is moving away from switch Teaming with their latest offerings. If you run the latest Microsoft products they will Team automatically without setting it up in the switch. The only problem is the older versions of Windows which does not support it. I guess if you have multiple switches then you would need to maintain Team connections between switches to support the latest Microsoft offering. You also burn lots of ports with Teaming especially if you Team with 4 links. And all switches need to support it. I have seen people with switching loops in their home network due to problems with Teaming and consumer gear.

I think I would wait until you constantly saturate one of your GIG links.

 

[KenZ71]

Maybe I missed it, what is the current setup and what is causing delays?

I am running NAS4Free on a HP ML10 never see lags while streaming & moving multi gig files to the NAS

Network is all gigabit with single ethernet cables to each device.

Maybe if my drives were faster than WD Greens I would be able to saturate the network. But, this setup works for me.

 

[System Error Message]

If you run the latest Microsoft products they will Team automatically without setting it up in the switch. The only problem is the older versions of Windows which does not support it.

Older microsoft products supports port teaming while newer ones dont. For example my dual 10Gbe NIC meant for datacenters wont want to run in windows 7. For home versions of windows only windows xp supported teaming whereas windows servers all support teaming but there are some restrictions to windows NIC teaming for any recent windows that supports it. Only intel NICs work for teaming with installing their driver.


Speed of a drive can be made better. First you start with an empty drive, benchmark it and note the peak. Then partition it and make sure the first sectors/cylinders are used in it and it would be a small partition using 10-20% of the drive but this first portion of the drive is the faster outer edge of it which will give you constant peak throughput. This can help you saturate a 1G link.

In the recent past 2.5 inch HDs had 50-80MB/s mainstream and now its around 80-150MB/s whereas 3.5 inch HD have always been faster between 100-150MB/s to now some drives get 200MB/s for mainstream drives so a single hard drive can saturate a 1G link. When you put drives in RAID they obviously are faster which if you are going for a NAS you most likely would have that setup. Also i think NAS4Free might be set up to prioritise stream over file transfers so you dont see lag, the stream is given priority over file transfers (detectable via file type/encoding application).

 

[coxhaus]

I was mistaken on the latest Teaming with Microsoft products. They are not going away from Teaming but have more options with the newer Microsoft products. Microsoft has Teaming which is switch based and non-switch based. This what I found on Microsoft's site.
⦁ Industry terms for NIC Teaming
Here are some other terms that are used in the context of NIC Teaming and what they are called in Windows Server 2012 R2:
Imagine this as a side by side table. I cannot get it to show correctly on the forum.
Term

IEEE 802.3ad
Link Aggregation Group (LAG)
Load Balancing and Failover (LBFO)
NIC Bonding
​

What we call it

LACP (or IEEE 802.1ax LACP)
Team (often refers to a team that uses LACP)
NIC Teaming
NIC Teaming​

 

[LoneWolf]

For me, the reasons to team are as follows:

1) Your server is running multiple virtual machines and one gigabit link is not enough for your local LAN (note: If you have more than one NIC, you can choose to dedicate individual NICs to virtual machines rather than team them all). This is not impossible, but is unlikely at home.
2) You have more than one switch, and the devices on one switch that communicate to the other switch exceed 1Gbps of bandwidth, making it desirable to team ports on one switch to ports on the other, in the form of a LAG (link aggregation group) to increase the bandwidth between the switches.
3) You are setting up NIC teaming for the purposes of failover; that is, if one network port dies either at the server or at the switch, the link will continue through the other port. This is useful in the enterprise, and nearly never an issue at home.

Note that in most cases, your 1Gbps link on your server will be faster than the I/O of its own hard drives, unless you managed to latch on to some 15k enterprise drives (still probably limited) or have the cash to do all of your storage via SSD. And it is very unlikely that in a home environment, you will be able to demand enough load from a server (read: it will have to be a multi-user simultaneous load, such as multiple 4K video streams) to saturate a single 1Gbps link. So if you're doing this for fun, great, but don't expect a big performance boost.

How you implement your teaming depends on the server software and/or the switch configuration. As Coxhaus mentioned, starting with Server 2012 and later, you can actually implement a basic NIC team that requires nothing from the switch, using a static LAG. This is pretty simple, and does not offer quite the performance of a LAG port group using LACP (as mentioned, that probably doesn't matter for a home network), but does not require a more expensive managed/smart switch.

The next most common (and generally seen in business) is creating a LAG, both on the switch, and the server, that supports LACP (Link Aggregation Control Protocol). This requires a smart/managed switch that supports this protocol, and setting up your Windows or other OS server with a LAG that also supports this. It is better controlled than just a basic static LAG, and isn't too hard to do with a little bit of experience.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_aggregation#Link_Aggregation_Control_Protocol

Before doing any of this, ask yourself if you're doing it to learn and experiment, or if you're hoping to gain something. If you're learning so you can apply your knowledge for work, an IT career, etc., cool. You're unlikely to gain anything performance-wise on a home network except under very specific conditions.