Fec team "bad" for switch?

[tato386]

I have a pair of servers that I believe would benefit from being connected with FEC teams to the switch that they are on. One is a Windows terminal server with 80+ users that are hitting a Borland database application that is several hundred megabytes in size. The application is fat on the client end meaning the clients do all the work of reading and writing the data as the server does not have a dedicated database engine as a SQL server would.

However, the network admin does not want to setup a team for me unless I can provide proof that the application is saturating the 100MB link. I don't see the harm in turning teaming on to let the users decide if performance has improved. The network admin says the it is doubtfull that the application needs more than 100MB and that if it doesn't the teaming will cause more harm that good by generating more data frames, interrupts and CPU cycles on the switch.

Can FEC really have a significanlty negative effect on a switch like he claims?

Thanks,

Diego

[marcusl]

Of course - the switch would have to "do more work", however I do NOT see this as an issue.

My recommendation to you is to start sampling statistics on the switchport (take a look at mrtg ie) and present them for the admin - if there is a high utilization, there is nothing further to discuss... :-)

/M

[rfroom]

All current and most legacy Cisco Catalyst switches do not use the CPU to forward frames. Therefore, Catalyst switches easily scale when adding FECs.

Nevertheless, unless the server can handle more 100Mbps, the application will not see a performance increase by using FEC.

[dgj]

You'd have thought it would be the network admin job to show you the statistics on that particular server (using MRTG to read ports on the switch for instance) and prove that you DON't need to team!

If setting up MRTG is a bother - try STG instead it can show you "live" statistics if you know the OID and SNMP comnmunity you want to view.

Check here : http://leonidvm.chat.ru/

You could also try Solarwinds tools (www.solarwinds.net) to check network devices - that also provides graphs for errors etc

Good Luck