Vista - Ethernet LAN Teaming

Hello everyone,

My motherboard supports 2 Gigabit Ethernet LAN through Teaming. Since I have a D-Link DIR-615 router that has 4 ports, I was thinking about trying to see what gain if any can be gotten with LAN teaming if I can get it to work.

I understand the basics about it, but I was wondering if anyone actually has or had LAN teaming (link aggregation) setup and how well did it work for you. I have searched the net, but there really isn't anything very helpful or detailed about setting it up. I'm hoping that someone could provide some more insight about this before I dive into it and find myself without a network connection for a bit. LOL


Thank you for anything you can add to help with the setup,
Shawn

If you want my opinion, it is going to be expensive to implement so let it go.

Your DIR-615 doesn't support 802.3.ad or LACP. There is no way that you will be ablue to use port teaming with your current neteork equipment.

I've done port trunking on Windows Server 2003 with Cisco switches using LACP for my company. I have no idea how much the switches cost at work but I'm sure they were alot, as in tens of thousands of dollars alot. Every application of port trunking, old term I guess it's now teaming, was for a server that needed a bigger pipe so it could spit out the data faster to the end users. If you're just intending to use this on your pc for general use, gaming or whatevernot I think the cost of the switch may outweight the benefits, which IMHO are going to be none if you don't have at least 10 to 25 fast computers with gigabit connections requesting resources from your server.

Datasheet Here: Cisco Catalyst 2960 Switches with LAN Base Software* [Cisco Catalyst 2960 Series Switches] - Cisco Systems

PC Rush.com Price for an 8 Port 10/100/1000 switch with 802.3.ad LACP support - $805.93 - Link: Cisco Catalyst 2960G-8TC Managed Ethernet Switch - WS-C2960G-8TC-L - 93616 | pcRUSH.com

I've only done a search on cisco mainly because they're the only brand I work with for serious networking. There may be other companies that may make a cheaper switch but I can also guarantee that the cheaper switches will work just as well as the money paid for them. Experience on hand on that one.

Thank you Fuzor_Silverbolt.

I was afraid that it was going to end up being something like that. That's just to much for some novelty I just wanted to try.

I've done port trunking between switches... but never to a Windows box.

Is Vista even capable of trunking without a specialized NIC? My understanding was that it required beyond your normal NIC + driver support... ??

At home, I've got a D-LINK DGS-1224T, which supports trunking, and four systems with multiple NIC's.


I'd Googled before, and never found anything... if you actually know how to achieve this with XP and/or Vista, can you post a quick how-to or link to such a how-to?

Thanks,
-ltwally

Brink,

Do you have a 2GB pipe to the Internet? Do you have another device on your network that has a 2GB pipe as well? If not, there is zero point in doing this.

S-

Hi Sidewinder,

No. I just have your standard 3 MB/s cable broadband connection for one computer through a Motorola SB5101 cable modem to the D-Link DIR-615 router (4 ports total) to just one of my two onboard Gigabit Ethernet LAN connections.

My plan was to test this with having both onboard Gigabit Ethernet LANs connected with separate ports on the D-Link DIR-615 router and see if the LAN teaming would work.

From what I see here and elsewhere, it does not look promising.

LOL, I'm a novice when it comes to this kind of networking setup.

vista handles teaming by just plugging in the extra nic cable xp needs extra software i think to do it.
theirs and old post on here or it was from the old site that touched on it briefly which is where i got the idea of playing around with it
i have 8 port gigabit router and i have two nics in 2 of my 5 puters on the network and when transferring files between the puters i can see a big difference in transfer speeds and yes both cards are being used
my computers all transfer at different speeds never anywhere near the 1 gig there supposed to be capable of doing which is why i started playing around with teaming

Thank you Chinga69.

I will have to go out and get another NIC cable and test it out then to see what happens.

Might be a few days, but I'll post back what happened.

no probs cheers

chinga69,

Vista certainly does not support NIC teaming on its own. The NICs used must support it and have a driver present that supports it.

S-