Gigbabit net only going 100mb

[AntiEarnie]

Upgraded 4 servres a month ago to from 100mb to gigabit. However, at no time does the combined throughput of the dual nic's go above ~100mb, they tend to seasaw back and forth on the dual nic's but from time to time only one int is used and i'll see that one spike up to ~100mb.

The Intel NIC's are configured to the 3400cl with Link Aggregation. All servers show Interfaces running at 1gb/full duplex. 3400cl also shows 1gb/full duplex.

As a side note the old 100mb NIC's are still in the servers as one interface on each is configured as the cluster net, old lan interface on these cards have been disabled.

Ok, here is the gear:
4x Win2k Adv servers (sp4) with Intel Pro/1000 MT dual nic cards
HP Procurve 3400cl
8x Cat6 (verified to cat6 & showing > 1gb on tester)


Has anyone come accross this before? I have been doing continious monitoring through the 3400cl since the setup and the teams will just NOT break the 100mb mark.

 

[Seaspray0]

You have 1 GB going from the PC's to the switch/hub, but what about from there? Have you tried a transfer from one PC that has a 1gb card to another PC that has a 1gb card through the switch? Could your switch be limiting the bandwidth? Try a crossover cable directly between two PC's to find out.

Start, Help. You'll be surprised what's there. A+/MCP/MCSE/MCDBA

 

[AntiEarnie]

All four servers are going into the 3400cl. Basically a star configuration with every point of the star showing 1gb/full duplex. I am not sure about using a crossover to connect a pair of teaming nic's together. As the servers are in use not I can not take a pair of them off the network to find out right now.

Clarification, the HP Procurve 3400cl is a 10/100/1000 managed switch. If memory serves its something like 80gb on the backplane and can take 10gb fiber uplink modules, fairly massive overkill in this context.

 

[nsantin]

check the switch and ensure the ports your servers are plugged into are set to 1000 and not auto.

 

[dkediger]

It can be pretty difficult to saturate a GB link through good equipment. Without specialized traffic simulators, you'll have a hard time "proving" your GB links.

About the best you could do with equipment on hand is to queue up several very large file transfers from different sources and try to start them in rapid order.

 

[AntiEarnie]

Heh, I am not really trying to saturate the net, just see if I can get it to break 100mb/s. Mostly I have been shifting a couple ~2GB files back and forth between the servers. Also, our backups tend to run around 100mb/s and shifting the files between servers does not break the 100mb/s mark at that time either.

 

[AntiEarnie]

Ok, I have risen to a new level of baffelment.

Broke the team's on a pair of servers, still only got 100mb/s
Broke the trunking on switch interfaces, still 100mb/s
Connected the two servers together with JUST a crossover cable... still 100mb/s

At every step I checked and interfaces on both servers showed 1gb/full.

Unable to just force the interfaces to 1gb full or half as both the switch and the intel cards are only allowing 1gb Auto. 10/100 I can force but not that speed.

Only thing I can think to do is pull the old 10/100 NIC's out tomorrow but I am unsure how they could be effecting this.