Dennis Wood
Senior Member
One of our test workstations here uses an P32N-SLI board from Asus. This board has dual NIC ports which can be configured using Nvdia's control panel in a team. With the other 802.3ad (supposedly) compliant switches we tested, this teaming would never work correctly if the switch was set up with a trunk corresponding to the teamed workstation. In fact the teaming seemed to work better with dumb switches...but regardless, it was buggy and we kept this workstation in single port mode.
With the HP Procurve 1800-24G switch, we've observed that it is the only switch that seems to handle 802.3ad LACP properly. Toggling LACP on the ports you want to trunk results in automatic and dynamic configuring as it should, and you don't configure a trunk otherwise.
So on a whim, I decided to test the Nvidia NIC teaming with the HP switch (LACP toggled on the two Nvidia NIC ports) and for the first time, it works properly, with no bugs. It's definitly faster so our standard 5 GB mixed file test suite just recorded the highest ever write rates to the TS509 in RAID 5 with 4GB of cache..78 MB/s write with a read rate of 96 MB/s. Yes I know there's 4GB of cache there but before teaming, the fastest we saw from the Nvidia box was 70MB/s write.
A Vista SP1 18GB file drag and drop to the NAS reported a write rate that peaked at 105MB/s and ended at 78MB/s during the write. The 18GB read from the NAS to workstation was stable at 93MB/s.
So if you're using Nvidia chipset mobo's with dual NIC setups, then you'll want to check out the HP Procurve 1800-24G, or 8G. Observing switch stats, it's obvious that both NAS load balancing ports are being used dynamically, even with just one workstation "hitting" the NAS.
With the HP Procurve 1800-24G switch, we've observed that it is the only switch that seems to handle 802.3ad LACP properly. Toggling LACP on the ports you want to trunk results in automatic and dynamic configuring as it should, and you don't configure a trunk otherwise.
So on a whim, I decided to test the Nvidia NIC teaming with the HP switch (LACP toggled on the two Nvidia NIC ports) and for the first time, it works properly, with no bugs. It's definitly faster so our standard 5 GB mixed file test suite just recorded the highest ever write rates to the TS509 in RAID 5 with 4GB of cache..78 MB/s write with a read rate of 96 MB/s. Yes I know there's 4GB of cache there but before teaming, the fastest we saw from the Nvidia box was 70MB/s write.
A Vista SP1 18GB file drag and drop to the NAS reported a write rate that peaked at 105MB/s and ended at 78MB/s during the write. The 18GB read from the NAS to workstation was stable at 93MB/s.
So if you're using Nvidia chipset mobo's with dual NIC setups, then you'll want to check out the HP Procurve 1800-24G, or 8G. Observing switch stats, it's obvious that both NAS load balancing ports are being used dynamically, even with just one workstation "hitting" the NAS.
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