How to get SLB Teaming working on Windows 2000 Servers?

[SAKET_5]

Hi,

Your help on this query will be really appreciated! We have around 10-15 Proliants DL380 G2/G3 ,ML530, DL580, etc with standard Compaq NC series NICs. We haven't got any success in actually configuring these NICs for Switch assisted load balancing. Although, we have the latest HP Teaming software installed and it reports (in its little network icon) that it is capable of 200Mbps, ftp tests and similar network performance tests prove that we hardly get 60Mbps network throughput.

The switches we have tried are Cisco 3550 and Nortel Bay switches with multi trunk configured on them for our NIC ports.

Microsoft support has advised us that there is no alteration required from the OS end for teaming, i.e it should just work!!

Could anyone please shed some light on this!!

Thank you in advance,

[Ruslan_2]

If you test the trasmit load balancing the thoughput you get depends on the variety of MAC or IP addresses you send network packets to. When you configure a team there is a radio button in the team properties which says "balance with MAC address" and "balance with IP address". No matter what method you choose the *trasmit* balancing alorithm will be the same. This is what online help says: "low order 4 bits of the destination MAc or IP address modulo the number of active team members, used as an in index into the set of active team members" to choose the adapter which will actually transmit the packet. So if you try to run ftp tests against a single test server you will hardly get more throughput.

Regards,

[SAKET_5]

Hi Ruslan,

Thanks for your input. I am aware of the limitations of Trasmit/Adaptive load balancing in a way that under this configuration only transmit traffic is load balanced and not receive and that also only for IP protocol. That is the reason why we are trying Switch assisted load balancing which according to HP documentations load balances both transmit and receive traffic for all protocols. However, we are not getting any success in configuring this i.e. we do not see any significant improvement in network throughput for dual 100MB NC series card configured for SLB teaming as opposed to performance of a singal NC series (100MB)card.

Also, during data transfer/receive under the switch assisted load balancing team, only one NIC appears to be operational, i.e. doing all the work! In theory, both the NICs of a team under this configuration should share the workload thus providing improved network throughput.

Anyone, any help!

Cheers,

[Ruslan_2]

According to HP documents the transmit load balancing algorithm is the same for both TLB and SLB. Therefore, no matter which configuration you use it can be a good idea to test network performance against multiple hosts simultaneously. Otherwise you will not be able to see any performance gain at all.

[SAKET_5]

Thanks Ruslan,

I actually am doing some tests along the same lines, however have you done SLB teaming on Win2k hosts? Do you know from experience if there is a marked network throughput improvement due to teaming in the way Windows deal with the TCP/IP stack?Just curious as I have seem some pretty impressive test results of Net Teaming on Linux.

Regards,

[Ruslan_2]

Unfortunately, I can prove my opinion with subjective observations only. We had lots of user complains about slow network preformance when they were connected to several of our terminal servers. But when we set up teaming those complains were just gone. But I don't have any numbers.

Best regards,