Diskless System

[Raylex]

Diskless systems surpassing the 1gb lan network connection?im currently using a linux enterprise and windows based diskless system and i was wondering on how i can increase the network speed beyond 1gb without spending so much on a 10gb network system

[Naeaes]

Install a second 1Gbps NIC and set up load balancing between the two.

[Stefan1024]

There are some old, but super cheap 4 GBit/s fiber NICs on Ebay.

[Sunshine1868]

13 hours ago, Naeaes said:

Install a second 1Gbps NIC and set up load balancing between the two.

Load balancing is not the same as Link Aggregation.

[ddbtkd456]

14 hours ago, Raylex said:

Diskless systems surpassing the 1gb lan network connection?im currently using a linux enterprise and windows based diskless system and i was wondering on how i can increase the network speed beyond 1gb without spending so much on a 10gb network system

Oh my god my eyes.

[beavo451]

What use is a system without disks and why would you need to increase speed if there is nothing there to access?

[Sevilla]

Link aggregation would be your only (cheaper) option, but as others have suggested, you need to make sure your switch supports it. Even unmanaged switches will support this feature, but you need to make sure yours does.

 

On another note, cheap 4Gbit NIC cards would only work in 1 of 2 scenarios:
1. You have a switch that can work with 4Gbit connections (usually costly).

2. You directly make a connection between two PCs through their 4GBit NICs, which would probably not work for you unless your network consists of only your host and client alone.

[KuJoe]

Go watch the video Linus did on the 10Gbps NIC with Twinax cable for under $150.

[Raylex]

On 4/12/2016 at 1:47 PM, Naeaes said:

Install a second 1Gbps NIC and set up load balancing between the two.

i did install additional NICs but i didnt know about the load balancing switch but i think load balancing doesnt make the network faster.thank you for your reply

 

On 4/12/2016 at 3:06 AM, Stefan1024 said:

There are some old, but super cheap 4 GBit/s fiber NICs on Ebay.

this means i have to buy fiber capable switches and cables so its a no go.

 

On 4/13/2016 at 10:22 AM, beavo451 said:

What use is a system without disks and why would you need to increase speed if there is nothing there to access?

i bet you havent googled what im talking about. google is your best friend

 

12 hours ago, Sevilla said:

Link aggregation would be your only (cheaper) option, but as others have suggested, you need to make sure your switch supports it. Even unmanaged switches will support this feature, but you need to make sure yours does.

 

On another note, cheap 4Gbit NIC cards would only work in 1 of 2 scenarios:
1. You have a switch that can work with 4Gbit connections (usually costly).

2. You directly make a connection between two PCs through their 4GBit NICs, which would probably not work for you unless your network consists of only your host and client alone.

thanks man.ill look it up and see if i can do this link aggregation.i have 7 servers and 300 diskless nodes/clients so i hope i can make it work.i still have to submit a proposal but thanks again.

 

12 hours ago, KuJoe said:

Go watch the video Linus did on the 10Gbps NIC with Twinax cable for under $150.

this was between 2 pc only right?so its a no go my friend  

[Jarsky]

23 hours ago, beavo451 said:

What use is a system without disks and why would you need to increase speed if there is nothing there to access?

A diskless system is one that boots off the network.

There are a lot of diskless systems, the most common being ThinClients for Citrix XenDesktop deploys.

[KuJoe]

56 minutes ago, Raylex said:

this was between 2 pc only right?so its a no go my friend  

According to your first post you have 2 systems, a Linux and Windows system. I see in your recent post this was not correct. You best bet is to invest in 10Gbps switches if you really have 307 devices on your network and they really need disk IO faster than 110MB/s. LACP is nice, but doubling your ports (614) becomes a much bigger hassle and even more so when you start to expand, it is nice having redundancy though but I haven't seen many thin clients that have dual NICs unless you're just using desktops in which case you can just add 300 PCI cards to the budget.

[Raylex]

52 minutes ago, KuJoe said:

According to your first post you have 2 systems, a Linux and Windows system. I see in your recent post this was not correct. You best bet is to invest in 10Gbps switches if you really have 307 devices on your network and they really need disk IO faster than 110MB/s. LACP is nice, but doubling your ports (614) becomes a much bigger hassle and even more so when you start to expand, it is nice having redundancy though but I haven't seen many thin clients that have dual NICs unless you're just using desktops in which case you can just add 300 PCI cards to the budget.

my bad for not clearing that out.i was pertaining to the servers.i have 5 linux based server and 2 windows based servers.the clients/nodes run win7/winxp.i just found out that multiple 64bit NIC,compared to the 32 bit, (maybe linus can make a video on this since not alot know about it) can increase my server network speeds since 1Gbs for the cllients/nodes are good enough.the software i use can manage the clients (e.g. NIC-1 can handles clients 1-50 and NIC-2 for 51-100....and so on) so can the LACP further increase my server network speeds?

[KuJoe]

28 minutes ago, Raylex said:

my bad for not clearing that out.i was pertaining to the servers.i have 5 linux based server and 2 windows based servers.the clients/nodes run win7/winxp.i just found out that multiple 64bit NIC,compared to the 32 bit, (maybe linus can make a video on this since not alot know about it) can increase my server network speeds since 1Gbs for the cllients/nodes are good enough.the software i use can manage the clients (e.g. NIC-1 can handles clients 1-50 and NIC-2 for 51-100....and so on) so can the LACP further increase my server network speeds?

From what i understand it can increase the bandwidth to the number of 1Gbps ports but it will not increase the throughput for a single threaded connections. So for example if you take 2 1Gbps ports and bond them together in LACP, you'll have 2Gbps available for 2 1Gbps ports but you will not get a single transfer speed of 2Gbps (but you can get 2 concurrent transfers at 1Gbps each).

[Raylex]

1 hour ago, KuJoe said:

From what i understand it can increase the bandwidth to the number of 1Gbps ports but it will not increase the throughput for a single threaded connections. So for example if you take 2 1Gbps ports and bond them together in LACP, you'll have 2Gbps available for 2 1Gbps ports but you will not get a single transfer speed of 2Gbps (but you can get 2 concurrent transfers at 1Gbps each).

thank you very much for the insights.now ill just have to buy the stuff and test it out.ill post the results if it really increases network speeds.

[Mark77]

I occasionally run one of my laptops completely diskless, PXE-booting to an iSCSI mount on my NAS machine.  I am able to monitor the throughput.  A faster network would not be of much, if any advantage.  Even with SSDs, throughput is rarely in excess of that of Gig-E. 

 

And yes, I have run "synthetic" benchmarks and have pushed Gig-E to its limits, around 125megabytes/second.  So its not a matter of my gear being able to keep up. 

[leadeater]

2 hours ago, Mark77 said:

I occasionally run one of my laptops completely diskless, PXE-booting to an iSCSI mount on my NAS machine.  I am able to monitor the throughput.  A faster network would not be of much, if any advantage.  Even with SSDs, throughput is rarely in excess of that of Gig-E. 

 

And yes, I have run "synthetic" benchmarks and have pushed Gig-E to its limits, around 125megabytes/second.  So its not a matter of my gear being able to keep up. 

I do the same thing for the disk that hosts my steam library on my desktop but using two Intel X540-T1 between that and the server. The server has an array of 6 SSDs and I can hit 4Gbps+ loading games and 10Gbps on benchmarks.

 

Generally speaking yea not much needs more than 1Gbps and latency really kills the usable bandwidth, even directly connected copper 10Gbps with jumbo frames is not even close to SATA bus latency.

 

I have switched from iSCSI to SMB 3 multichannel though as it is slightly faster.