I'm not being dense am I?

[Shad]

Link aggregation by way of teaming NICs - say I've got a server with dual Broadcom NICs running as a 2Gbps team, connected to a switch with the ports configured as an LACP port. If I fit an Intel dual port NIC in a workstation and team its ports and again configure them on the switch as a 2Gbps LACP port... I'll only ever see 1Gbps between them, right? The advantage comes when two 1Gbps workstations want to communicate at their full speed with the server, that will work.

Right? I've read conflicting things but generally this seems to be how it's told. Apart from when the packets are striped across the ports in the team, in those cases it runs at full speed.

 

[PistolPete]

... I'll only ever see 1Gbps between them, right? The advantage comes when two 1Gbps workstations want to communicate at their full speed with the server, that will work.

Right? I've read conflicting things but generally this seems to be how it's told. Apart from when the packets are striped across the ports in the team, in those cases it runs at full speed.

Yes, and the reason you have read conflicting info is that depends on how the load balancing is done across the NICs as to whether in a specific instance you'll get the full 2Gb/s or you'll just saturate 1 half of the link. If you have 2 clients accessing the server at once you are more likely to get closer to the 2Gb/s.

 

[Shad]

Cool. So in the case of a basic Windows SMB transfer with a Broadcom team on the server and an Intel team on the workstation, it's unlikely to utilise more than 1 port... right?

 

[Zarf]

Cool. So in the case of a basic Windows SMB transfer with a Broadcom team on the server and an Intel team on the workstation, it's unlikely to utilise more than 1 port... right?

Correct, for now - In SMB 3.0 (Server 2012, Windows 8) it'll multipath over all links on a single transfer.

 

[Deleted member 138126]

Cool. So in the case of a basic Windows SMB transfer with a Broadcom team on the server and an Intel team on the workstation, it's unlikely to utilise more than 1 port... right?

It's got nothing to do with the brand of the NICs. It's to do with the type of link aggregation, which is dependent on the switch. It's pretty straightforward to test, using something like iperf:
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/lanwan/lanwan-howto/30388-measuring-network-performance-iperf

 

[Shad]

Rotor, haven't bought the Intel NICs yet so just trying to get a clear understanding first.

It does make for a compelling reason to upgrade to Server 2012 though. Just not quite sold on Windows 8 yet... shame SMB3 isn't available to R2/7.

 

[Deleted member 138126]

Rotor, haven't bought the Intel NICs yet so just trying to get a clear understanding first.

It does make for a compelling reason to upgrade to Server 2012 though. Just not quite sold on Windows 8 yet... shame SMB3 isn't available to R2/7.

For SMB3 you would also need Windows 8 at the client end. I would Google the model of switch to see what link aggregation modes you've got, and then confirm whether there are known problems with any particular model of NIC.