Teaming LAN NIC's on Windows 10

[toastfacegrillah]

Hi all, this is my first question so excuse me if it has been asked etc, however I've scoured the internet and cannot find any information on Teaming NIC's etc in Windows 10 Build 1607 onward all I can find is that it was once available in the developers release via CLI.

 

I'm looking to "team" my two Realtek GBe adapters, however I cannot find how to do so, when plugging them both in it appears to default to a type of LBFO, but I've only gathered this by watching the interface behavior in the performance monitor of Windows 10 (Ctrl + Alt + Esc, Performance tab). 

 

Will having my two adapters in what seems to be a LBFO allow for dual gigabit bandwidth? I understand my clients are not running on Dual NIC's however it's more about simultaneous access of my servers SSD's where there is a lot of SSD to SSD transfers and is easy to saturate a single GBe interface.,

 

Specs

Windows 10 1607 (It doubles as a HTPC, Steam Streamer etc)

e5450 Xeon (771 to 775 Conversion)

8GB DDR2

Nvidia GT710

GA-EP45-UD3R

2 x Realtek GBe Family Adapters on 8.50.1223.2016 drivers.

3 x SSD's

4 x HDD's RAID 5

[leadeater]

Windows 10 does not support NIC teaming, this feature has not been implemented since the core networking stack was changed. Windows Server 2016 does support it.

 

Microsoft wants people to use SMB Multichannel which is all well and good but as the same suggests only works with SMB.

 

You can manually balance the load by configuring clients to talk to the server on different IP addresses, that will work but is very manual.

[toastfacegrillah]

Thank you for your reply, 

 

I'll look into the SMB Multichannel, I havent even heard of that yet so looking forward to some research.

 

The manual balancing is a great Idea actually, might give that a go also as my network splits over two houses, would also be a good way to isolate my traffic monitoring.

 

Forgive my ignorance but would it be possible to pull the networking build from Windows Server into Windows 10? Or is it the actual Core build of the entire Windows Server? 

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, toastfacegrillah said:

Forgive my ignorance but would it be possible to pull the networking build from Windows Server into Windows 10? Or is it the actual Core build of the entire Windows Server? 

It's pretty well locked out of Windows 10 by Microsoft.

[toastfacegrillah]

Just a theoretical, what If I ran Windows Server 2016 in a VM within Windows 10 to achieve the teaming, or would it require native control of the hardware to function properly? If that was the case, could you add a 3rd NIC for Windows 10, then use the existing two NIC's for Teaming within the VM.

[Falconevo]

8 hours ago, toastfacegrillah said:

Just a theoretical, what If I ran Windows Server 2016 in a VM within Windows 10 to achieve the teaming, or would it require native control of the hardware to function properly? If that was the case, could you add a 3rd NIC for Windows 10, then use the existing two NIC's for Teaming within the VM.

That would technically work using Windows NIC Teaming in 2016, however you will need to create the vSwitch configuration correctly to set individual network interfaces for the VM to utilise different physical interfaces.

 

Not sure why you would want to, if your switch doesn't support LACP then you would only get the benefit from 'dynamic load balancing' which doesn't cover all traffic only certain scenarios.  If you are after 2x bandwidth, dynamic teaming won't do this.. only protocols such as LACP will do this and unless you have a capable switch it won't function as desired.

 

I suggest doing some reading here;

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows-server-docs/networking/technologies/nic-teaming/nic-teaming

 

Unfortunately as people have mentioned they removed the teaming configuration from Windows 10, it IS capable but they removed it and it can no longer be used outside of the old insider builds.

[toastfacegrillah]

Thank you for your reply, I will study that link it has great information. At my limits with networking knowledge at this level so this will be a learning experience.

 

Ah I remember looking into this now, link aggregating, your right that's what I was after. My switches do support 802.3ad (Up to 6 aggregating groups)