LAN Teaming

[roldogg]

I recently purchased an X99-Deluxe MB, and it has 2 1GB LAN ports. One of the options in the settings is to set these up for LAN teaming. Is there any benefit to using LAN teaming?

 

[Nullity]

I recently purchased an X99-Deluxe MB, and it has 2 1GB LAN ports. One of the options in the settings is to set these up for LAN teaming. Is there any benefit to using LAN teaming?

That is another way of saying link aggregation. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_aggregation

You could increase your connection rate or use it for load balancing. The link explains it in much more detail.

 

[coxhaus]

For home use I doubt you will see a benefit. It would be better to make sure you have gig connections for all LAN devices. Can your server sustain more than a gig of though put? A gig connection covers most of what home users need for one device. My rule is to keep as simple as possible but also as fast as possible.

 

[roldogg]

I'm assuming it will. Of course, I don't have a GB connection coming into the house, it's 150Mbps, but I have approximately 40 devices on my network, but none of them are ever using lots of bandwidth simultaneously. I just finished an upgrade on my system, but I'm now interested in getting rid of my WD Cloud NAS and buying a "real" NAS, which I could use as a backup device for multiple computers and be able to stream media files from it to desktops, laptops, smartphones, tablets, Smart TVs, etc around the house. Some of the NAS devices I've looked at (I've only been looking for a week or so) have 1, 2, 4, and have an option to upgrade to 10GBe. Between my system and my router (currently an Asus RT-AC87R) is a switch (Netgear ProSafe GS108Ev3 8 pport switch) which I use in my office so I can hardwire multiple devices directly to my router instead of using its wireless AC signal. The specs on the switch say each port can handle 2GB of traffic, but I just want to make sure I'm not going to have a bottleneck, especially whenever I finally decide on a good NAS to buy, which needs to be able to stream 4K video.

I have my new system running an i7-5960X CPU on an Asus X99-Deluxe MB, 2 EVGA GeForce GTX 780 Ti Superclocked GPUs running SLI, everything in a custom waterloop, but I don't know much about switches, NASs, etc, so before I go spend money on this, I want to make sure I'm not buying something expensive with features I'll never, or won't be able to utilize, but I also don't want to buy something bottom of the line that will bottleneck my bandwidth. This is the first time I've bought a MB that had dual Gigabit connections and I'm not sure if the teaming, or link aggregation, is to increase throughput, reduce latency, or give you a more stable connection by having a 2nd LAN port to fall back on.

Thanks for the link to this article. Now I can at least familiarize myself with it, but if you have any kind of input about what type of hardware (a switch, a hub, and/or a NAS) that will be able to stream 4K content, possibly to multiple devices at the same time, I would appreciate any input. Thanks again.

 

[coxhaus]

If you decide to use the second NIC make sure you have a switch which supports both NICs. If you just plug in 2 NICs from the same machine into an unsupported switch you can slow your network down.

 

[Nullity]

If you decide to use the second NIC make sure you have a switch which supports both NICs. If you just plug in 2 NICs from the same machine into an unsupported switch you can slow your network down.

Yeah... I did that. Plugged in 2 nics from my pfSense router into the AP, before I had completed setting up LACP. Killed the LAN pretty fast. That solidified that I was messing with things above my pay-grade, so I gave up (for now...).

 

[System Error Message]

lan teaming works best with a switch that supports it. I use to to get 20Gb/s by combining 2 SFP+ between my router and switch.

 

[coxhaus]

Yeah... I did that. Plugged in 2 nics from my pfSense router into the AP, before I had completed setting up LACP. Killed the LAN pretty fast. That solidified that I was messing with things above my pay-grade, so I gave up (for now...).

I think how much your network will be affected by 2 NICs not setup but connected will depend on how good your spaning tree support is. In a switch with good spanning tree support one NIC will automatically be blocked and run as a redundant port and all is good.
Without spanning tree support the switch will slow down and eventually crash.

 

[Nullity]

I think how much your network will be affected by 2 NICs not setup but connected will depend on how good your spaning tree support is. In a switch with good spanning tree support one NIC will automatically be blocked and run as a redundant port and all is good.
Without spanning tree support the switch will slow down and eventually crash.

Good point.
My only switch is the RT-N66U, which supports STP but I forget what it defaults to ("off" iirc).

 

[azazel1024]

That is another way of saying link aggregation. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_aggregation

You could increase your connection rate or use it for load balancing. The link explains it in much more detail.

It doesn't increase your connection rate, it allows more connections at the same speed.

IE you don't get 2Gbps on a connection with teaming/link aggregation, but you can have two simultaneous 1Gbps connections going.

SMB Multichannel allows an increase in your connection rate (to another source with SMB Multichannel). So you CAN get a 2Gbps connection. Windows 8, 8.1 and Server 2012 ONLY at the moment (well, Windows 10 will have it).

 

[Nullity]

It doesn't increase your connection rate, it allows more connections at the same speed.

IE you don't get 2Gbps on a connection with teaming/link aggregation, but you can have two simultaneous 1Gbps connections going.

SMB Multichannel allows an increase in your connection rate (to another source with SMB Multichannel). So you CAN get a 2Gbps connection. Windows 8, 8.1 and Server 2012 ONLY at the moment (well, Windows 10 will have it).

My mistake. Is there no method of combining 2 connections into 1 ~2x speed connection?

I did this over a decade ago with two 56k modems and two phones-lines.

 

[coxhaus]

Most of time when you combine things you gain bandwidth not speed. So if you are not using what you already have there will be no gains realized.

 

[Nullity]

Most of time when you combine things you gain bandwidth not speed. So if you are not using what you already have there will be no gains realized.

Ah, I assumed connection speed and connection bandwidth were interchangeable phrases.

Back on dial-up my 2 modems and phone-lines were connected as a single connection and my single stream FTP downloads increased from 4-5Kbyte/sec to 9-10Kbyte/sec. I wonder why modern NICs cannot achieve this.

 

[coxhaus]

You will see the same kind of effect on gig ports as you did with your modems. You just need to be able to saturate the first gig line to realize the benefit of the second. This is assuming both gig ports are setup correctly for teaming or link aggregation on the machine and switch.

PS
Home networks don't have enough network demand to fill a gig pipe from a server. You could do it with 100meg connections and video but gig is just too fast in most cases for home.

 

[azazel1024]

You will see the same kind of effect on gig ports as you did with your modems. You just need to be able to saturate the first gig line to realize the benefit of the second. This is assuming both gig ports are setup correctly for teaming or link aggregation on the machine and switch.

PS
Home networks don't have enough network demand to fill a gig pipe from a server. You could do it with 100meg connections and video but gig is just too fast in most cases for home.

No, not really. It most certainly is not "too fast" in most cases for home.

For link aggregation you don't "fill one up" and then start using the 2nd one, only if you have multiple connections running at the same time.

For link aggregation your limit is 1Gbps for each connection to the computer, you can just have multiple 1Gbps connections up to the number of NICs in the team/LAG.

You CAN combine multiple NICs for both higher net throughput and higher single connection speed. As I mentioned it is called SMB Multichannel and it is a feature in Windows 8, 8.1, Server 2012 and Windows 10.

There are reasons why Teaming/aggregation hasn't/can't do this and Multichannel can (for one, a team is logically a single IP address, where as with SMB multichannel each NIC has its own IP). Its a non-trivial issue to effectively interleave packets and reassemble them at the receiving end and it certainly requires support at both ends of the pipe to do it. There isn't necessarily any reason why teaming/LAG couldn't support connection "bonding/multichannel" type operation/performance, but everything along the way would need to effectively support it and the protocols that dictate LAG were never designed with that in mind, so a new one would need to be implemented and network gear manufacturers would need to build the functionality in. Anything along the way the didn't support it would break this.

SMB multichannel doesn't need to do this as Windows has the ability built in to prevent loops from occuring without having to worry about LAG/teaming when connecting more than one NIC to a switch/network and it'll spawn multiple SMB sessions on a single transfer. It is much more resource intensive.

 

[coxhaus]

At what point in a gig pipe do you really benefit with SMB. If you are only using 3% of a gig pipe do you really gain anything from putting data on a different pipe. Switches only allow one port at a time to communicate so as I see it the second port is waiting on the first port.

 

[coxhaus]

I have been reading and SMB multichannel is pretty neat. Microsoft is spreading the TCP/IP across multiple CPU cores. You do not need Teaming to benefit. It also builds in redundancy for your NICs. This may force you to start looking at 10G for backbones connections. Your 1 gig linked switches are now starting to go obsolete as they may become the bottle necks in your network. One large switch with a big backplane is in order, no more little switches linked together.

I am still not sure why you would need this in a small home network but it is something to think about and start planning for.

 

[azazel1024]

Because I like faster file transfers. I don't NEED it, but I sure want it. I transfer big files around my network fairly frequently, so having x2 the bandwidth for transfers is awfully nice.

My network design is a 16 port TP-Link SG2216 with an edge 16 port Trendnet TEG-160sw taking up the rest of the slack. I've done pretty extensive testing and with a 2-port LAG between the switches, SMB Multichannel works across the switches perfectly. Doesn't matter if my server and desktop are on the SG2216 (like they normally are) or split between the TEG160SW and the SG2216, I get 235MB/sec max network performance (though I haven't tested with one port each on both switched, just server and desktop on the same switch and server on one switch, desktop on the other).

It is part of the reason I use only semi-managed switchs, so that I can ensure I have a nice fat pipe through every part of my network (though one location I stupidly only put in a single LAN drop and there is no realistic way to bump it up to 2 connections, but it is only for my entertainment center, where I have a DGS1100-05 running switching duties for an Xbox One and an Apple TV).

In an addition I am planning in a couple of years, I won't run everything back to my network/server space, as it'll take too much routing of wire and general cost in wire. I'll run a 2xCat6 + 2xMM fiber from a closet in the addition to my network/server space. That way I have the possibility of future upgrades, and if I ever find myself starved for bandwidth and can't go to 10GbE (or something else), I can move from 2x1Gbps LAG to a 4x1Gbps LAG by incorporating the fiber I plan on laying.

A small part of the extra bandwidth too, is that when I am doing something, or my wife or whatever, there is extra bandwidth available and/or what is using the existing bandwidth can likely finish sooner so it doesn't impact anything else on my network. My desktop is the only thing that can realistically push my network bandwidth, but if that IS in heavy use with the server, I don't want it trampling everything else (say streaming to my Apple TV, or trying to copy an ISO to my laptop or something...which can do >50MB/sec wirelessly. Wired doesn't really matter as my wife and kids NEVER use a wire with the laptop, though I do occasionally for really big transfers).

 

[coxhaus]

Fiber is really a good thing as they always seem to build faster fiber modules before copper. If you use multimode it really is not that much more expensive. I would standardize on the size and connector so all of your fiber becomes inter changeable. The other nice thing about fiber is if you run between buildings lightening is not going to transverse the fiber as it not a conductor and works very well in the ground also. The distance on fiber is much farther than copper

 

[azazel1024]

Nah, it is all within the same structure, so no worries on conductivity. Since I don't have formal blue prints yet, just some hand sketches on some graph paper I am not sure exactly where everything will lay in the end, however, it is only about a 50-60ft run total, so distance isn't an issue on this one.

A future home project is to tear down my shed, expand the pad and build a dettached 1 car garage. THAT is about 100ft from my house, plus distance within the structure gets me to around 150ft to connect it. That will be fiber buried in a conduit next to the power I am running out in the same trench. Also planning dual MM fiber run out to the structure, more for link redundancy in case one of the fibers ever fails for some reason. Really don't want to have to trench a second time (and I'll probably leave some lubed nylon cord through the conduit in case I ever have to pull anything else through).

I am planning on LC ends OM2 fiber (my current SFP modules are LC, and the bit of fiber I do have is OM2, though I have nothing like enough for either fiber project. I've got a couple of 1m lengths and I think a 3m length).