Link Aggregeation w/ jumbo frame question

[jraynorlxx]

I have set up a team between my two Marvell chip-based NICs via Marvell driver in Vista 32bit.
The two Marvell chips are 88E8056 on the motherboard and 88E8053 on a Rosewill card. Both are PCI-e based and connected to a Netgear GS108T via the same kind of cat6 UTP cable(I also tried GS724AT)
For the Marvell team feature, it will set up a virtual team NIC(and the original ones will disappear from the device management) . The only thing you can setup in the team NIC is the MAC address and the way you want to do the Team(dynamic, static or basic). Other features like Jumbo Frame or Flow Control can be set up separately for each card via an Adapter Properties Button in the team NIC.

The problem will come out when I set up jumbo frame on the NIC side.

The 8053 is fine for 1514, 4088, 9014.(all shows green in team NIC)
The 8056 can only work at 1514.(a yellow dot, which indicates "Link up, no link partner found", will shown up if 4088 or 9014 is applied)

If I do not build the team, both cards works flawlessly with either switch and any frame mode.
The driver for NICs is up-to-date(may try some earlier edition during the weekend)
I have no idea about how to figure out if this is a problem of the chip or the driver or it is a compatible issue with Netgear smart switch.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Albatroscr]

Hello,

The switch does not support link aggregeation only the cheapest one DELL 2708 will do it.

Maybe I'm wrong...

 

[jraynorlxx]

Well, I am pretty much sure that my Netgears works with link aggregation
But I am not that sure if they are fully support the feature.
I admit that the settings of this is not something easy like just plug in the cable and click enable.

 

[macput]

hi,

I have the exact same problem.

on my rampage formula I the marvell 88e8056 teamed up and linking to a netgear GS-108t switch.

i'm pretty sure the switch is supporting jumbo frames up to 9014...

When i use 1514 on the rampage formula , everything works fine. But when i change the nic cards (similar to what you describe above) to a different jumbo size, the yellow dot appears and the connection fails.

someone has a clue of this is switch or nic related? using latest firmware on switch and nic.
Or are there other settings that are necessary to make jumbo size bigger then 1514 to work in a link aggregation set-up like described.

thanks for any help

mac

 

[Dennis Wood]

The GS108T does fully support 802.3ad so no worries there. In our tests, jumbo frames do little to increase performance on the LAN, particularly if you're using Vista with it's SMB2.

Link aggregation does require both NIC's configured exactly the same, something you can check by accessing them via the Marvel teaming interface. I would not be surprised though if either the teaming driver or GS108T had issues with jumbo frames and LACP. Every time I've configured jumbo frames (doesn't matter which switch) there have been various weird network issues even with all NICs config'd with the jumbo frame size. If you only have 1 workstation, great, but add a few different OS's, NICs and workstations and it seems jumbo frames end up as a PITA.