How to take advantage from two 1G network adapters?

[palibebeh]

Ok people, I've been wondering about this for some time.
I have two 1G network adapters on my render nodes and on the workstation.
Is there a way to utilize the second adapter for let's say networ rendering?
We all know the impact of large textures/proxies when they are loaded from unc
or nas. How to configure the network (IPs, license etc.) to properly take advantage
of the second 1G network adapter?

cheers!

Maciej

[Morne]

if you're already connected to your network with the one NIC, connected the other to same network is not going to make any difference.

[instinct]

Mind you this doesnt help a thing if the fileserver isnt providing more then 1GBit. As the fileserver end is prolly the bottleneck with multiple Slave accessing files at once.

Regards,
Thorsten

[palibebeh]

thanks guys, so it seems that without a major network upgrade (filesever/router etc) connecting second nic is pretty much pointless.

[andrewjohn81]

also, just to point out....many programs, such as max, will automatically bind ONLY to the first NIC unless you change that manually in the registry. Windows doesn't automatically switch to the fastest one or anything. Some programs will actually have problems if you have 2 NIC cards. We use to have two. We used one card for one network and the other for our smaller internal network, which is faster. It was faster connecting to our drives, but caused so many other problems eventually that it wasn't worth the hassle.

Due to that I would recommend against it unless you have a very good network admin who has good control of it.

[dcullipher]

This depends on the type of card. With Intel dual port cards, and probably others, you can use teaming. Its easy to setup in the OS and you can do more than two ports. There are 4 port cards out there as well. We actually have a 4 port card on the server teamed to give 4Gigabit throughput and on some workstations I have 2 ports teamed. Besides the cards your Switch needs to support link aggregation, most of the web managed switches do this even the $300 ones from dell.

As others have said though you will see no benefit in speed unless you set it up this way, and it can cause issue as each card will have a separate IP unless you team them.

[instinct]

and the server/hdds/raid needs to support that throughput too. I many slaves access different physical locations on the disk this can get pretty crushing rather sooner then later. Depending on the amount of slaves tho of course

Regards,
Thorsten

[dcullipher]

Very true. You need at least a 5 drive RAID to get the disk speed to give multiple connections the bandwidth they need unless its just a single machine.