NIC Teaming setup

[Benb96]

Hey guys,

 

I just added a 4 port Intel PRO /1000 PT network card to my server. The host machine is running windows server 2012. I want to run multiple VM's.

 

Currently I have a CCTV server running on windows Server which is quite heavy on bandwidth.

 

How should I configure the NIC Teaming for best performance and balance?

 

In addition to the Intel 4 port NIC, my motherboard Ethernet port is also connected.

 

I have a DrayTek router (enterprise grade) so I was wanting to setup VLAN tagging on the VM's (if that's best practice)?

 

 

[brwainer]

I'm not sure about server 2012, but in Server 2012R2 there is a teaming wizard in the Server Manager, on the Local Server pane. If your router/switch supports LACP then you shouldn't have to do anything on it (although maybe enable LACP), but if it doesn't then you should set up a link aggregation group on the switch/router manually.

[Electronics Wizardy]

What switch?

 

You don't need to touch the router at all

 

You need to configure the switch.

 

Your probably fine with just one gigabit network connection.

[Erkel]

What is your definition of "quite heavy on bandwidth."  

[brwainer]

20 minutes ago, Erkel said:

What is your definition of "quite heavy on bandwidth."  

Good point, I hadn't thought to ask

 

On 3/16/2017 at 2:35 PM, Benb96 said:

Currently I have a CCTV server running on windows Server which is quite heavy on bandwidth.

Do you know what the actual data rate at the server is? My employer manages about 2 dozen surveillance properties with IPTV cameras, mostly SD, with the largest property having about 150. One property has about 40 720p cameras. None of our properties come close to bottlenecking on a single gigabit connection to the server. I wouldn't expect bottlenecking on a 1Gb connection unless you have a good number of 1080p or greater cameras, or more than 50 720p cameras. You can also look at the bitrate that is programmed on each camera and multiply by your number of cameras, it should come out to fairly close to what the actual rate you see on the server port is.

[CaptainRedHat]

With your setup, the only bonding mode that would be worth configuring is 802.3ad Dynamic Link Aggregation (LACP). There's only two bonding modes that affect receive traffic, which are LACP and Adaptive Load Balancing (balance-alb). If you have a switch that supports it, you'd want to use LACP because that would essentially turn your four 1Gb links into a single 4 Gb link. If not, use balance-alb which balances the receive traffic using ARP negotiation. That way different cameras should use different ports. I'm not super sure on Windows Server 2012, but from what I remember in Windows Server 2008R2, I had to install the intel proset drivers and then those settings are managed in the Device Properties in Device Manager. Good luck!

[doup93]

LBFO (Load Balacing Fail Over) is available  in server 2012 and can be used with VM's to ensure that. What it does not do is link aggregation so configuring a 4-port LBFO to be used by a virtual switch will not give each VM access up to 4 gb. It will spread the load of all VM's onto that group and if a link fails, it will fail over any VM using that link to another link.

 

http://www.itprocentral.com/overview-of-nic-teaming-lbfo-in-windows-server-2012/