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I was wondering if anyone could shed some light on implementing round robin NIC teaming, considerations, and best practices. Looking for some concise and clear information regarding it.

I do a lot of drive imaging over the network and saving time during drive imaging would save us a lot of money. Our biggest throttle so far has been our network. We are currently limited by a gigabit infrastructure.

I would like to implement an imaging station running some flavor of *nix. This imaging station would ultimately connect to a SAN volume over NFS. My thought was I could pick up some NICs and throw them into the imaging station. Then get another computer with the same amount of NICs and connect them directly over a bonded NIC team utilizing round robin scheduling. I believe between the imaging machine and the other machine we would in theory have connection able to achieve through-put considerably higher than that of a single Gbit connection. Yes?

In summation, would attempting to team 4 NICs and using round robin scheduling in a point-to-point connection between two computers achieve throughput in a single data transfer at or over 3 Gbit/s?

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  • are you transferring the same image? Are you multicasting?
    – Keltari
    May 7, 2013 at 18:15
  • @Keltari Single transfers of unique disks. This is not an imaging environment for client machines. One disk at a time, a different disk, every time.
    – 0xhughes
    May 7, 2013 at 18:34

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In practical application the teaming would not be the best solution. I know specifically when using Ghost if you use two NIC cards and connect Ghost to each individual NIC card you get better throughput as opposed to teaming. I also noticed, specifically with Ghost, if you started individual sessions you got better throughput.

So instead of teaming 4 NIC cars just have all 4 NIC cards with separate IP addresses and connect each image session to the individual NIC card of your choice and do manual load balancing. So say you have to image 9 workstations. You will connect 3 sessions to each NIC card. That way it is only processing 3 images out of that NIC card and not 9.

This also eliminates maxing out the single port's bandwidth on the switch you may be using as teaming could do.

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  • This is somewhat inline with the type of performance I would like. Generally I only am imaging one disk at a time, sometimes two, only sparingly however. My aim is to be able to transfer the image of the disk at disk speed. The SAN can I/O at up to around 400MB/s, the single disks(and SSDs) I generally image I/O around 80-140 MB/s. I'd like to be able to handle disks appropriately that reach for that disk speed and be able to get that data down on SAN disk as fast as possible. These speeds sometimes, in theory, would exceed a 1 Gbit line's capabilities.
    – 0xhughes
    May 7, 2013 at 20:26
  • The bottleneck is the line capability as you know. So by separating the network traffic through 4 different NICS instead of two (teamed) you maximize the throughput. The key for max throughput is connecting each client to 1 NIC card for a max of 4 total client connections to the server. Now if I understand you are connecting two clients, both of which have 4 NIC cards and you want to connection NIC to NIC. Not team 2 NICs on the same client?
    – Travis
    May 8, 2013 at 11:56
  • They would be connected NIC to NIC, and I believe the interfaces on each NIC would be bonded. @Travis
    – 0xhughes
    May 28, 2013 at 18:30
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If your switch is still limiting at 1Gbit, you're goign to cap-out your transfer.

All teaming in this instance should achieve is being able to [more-or-less] simultaneously push out 3+ Gbit connections (of course, limited by your CPU and other factors).

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  • The teamed connection would be direct. Computer|NIC|<->|NIC|Computer
    – 0xhughes
    May 7, 2013 at 16:53
  • @0xhughes - so the target has 4 NICs as well?
    – warren
    May 7, 2013 at 18:48
  • That is correct.
    – 0xhughes
    May 7, 2013 at 19:05
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    This wouldn't be teaming. This is simply matching up NIC card to NIC card. Teaming is a term used to apply to link aggregation or failover whereas a single computer with multiple NICs "teams up" so that if one NIC fails the other takes over. What you describe is peer-to-peer and not a client-server relationship. I believe I misunderstood your original question looking back. I believe you may be over complicating.
    – Travis
    May 8, 2013 at 12:01
  • @Travis Perhaps I should use the word bonded interfaces instead of teaming? I figured they were somewhat synonymous for one reason or another.
    – 0xhughes
    May 8, 2013 at 13:28

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