Switch binding?

easyrider · 7 Apr 2014 at 08:13

I have my server in the garage...from the garage I have run 3 x cat 6 cable to the switch in the study in the house....currently I have just one live cat 6 connected to the server feeding movies around the house connected to the switch.

Anyway I ran into some buffering issues when I tried streaming 3x 1080p videos to 3 TVs in the house at the same time.

I was chatting to a mate and he said I could bind all three cables in the garage to the switch in the study to make a 3 gig connection from garage to the study improving bandwidth...

Is this possible?

Cheers

Trifid · 7 Apr 2014 at 08:29

easyrider said:
Is this possible?

Cheers

Yes, if your switch and server support LACP. You ideally want to use either 2, 4 or 8 bundles as the split wouldn't be 1/3 1/3 and 1/3rd with 3 cables.

Felix · 7 Apr 2014 at 09:34

Intel server NICs call it teaming.

easyrider · 7 Apr 2014 at 09:35

Does the HP Microserver 54L support it?

randal · 7 Apr 2014 at 09:38

100% sure the bottleneck is the network and not disk or CPU on the N54L?

leigh_boy · 7 Apr 2014 at 10:59

what OS are you using? if its windows server you will find a binding / teaming options on the adapter settings.

easyrider · 7 Apr 2014 at 11:13

randal said:
100% sure the bottleneck is the network and not disk or CPU on the N54L?

I will test further just to make sure....Don't think so though.

easyrider · 7 Apr 2014 at 11:13

leigh_boy said:
what OS are you using? if its windows server you will find a binding / teaming options on the adapter settings.

Server 2012 R2

james.miller · 7 Apr 2014 at 11:27

streaming 3 blurays you should see no more than 300Mbps (about 37-38MB/sec) absolute worst case. That's well below saturating a 1gb network so something is up there. is there some transcoding going on?

to give you an idea, im streaming 7 copies of a 36gb bluray (1080p) and a 5gb mkv at the same time and according to my microserver, it's upstream peaked at about 50MB/sec which is 400Mbps or something around there. theoretically i could just about do the same again and stream 14 copies without saturating a 1Gbps link but i suspect i would run in to mechanical hard drive limitations (seek times) trying to steam 12 movies at once. If i had SSDs in there it'd be fine im sure.

easyrider said:
Does the HP Microserver 54L support it?

N54l has a single NIC, so no, not out of the box. You'd need a dual NIC card in the server but network bandwidth from the server shouldnt be an issue anyway (unless there is a network fault) so it wont help.

Zarf · 12 Apr 2014 at 13:39

Yeah, my money is on a storage IOPS issue, rather than network bandwidth. Transcoding is another good bet on a low-power cpu such as a Microserver uses.
How is your storage configured? If it's just a bunch of mechanical drives in RAID5 it'll struggle. You might be able to do something with increased caching and the use of SSD tiering, but your best bet is probably to set up a second server so you can balance the load.