I have two 24-port switches that in turn connect to 6 24-port switches. There's a device trying to FTP into a PC at each of the leaf ports (6 x 24 devices). All at once.
On the PC end, I am trying to make sure that the bandwidth is adequate for the job. So, i grabbed a quad port 1000GT card by Intel. Teaming for performance.
Long story shot, intermittently the kernel time goes to 25% on a quad CPU system, locking up anything network-related. What would you recommend?
Are the switches also configured to support the teaming? Most of the time the switch needs to know to team the ports together along with the NIC.
(When it doesn't, weird stuff starts happening like dropped connections and TCP issues...)
I'd report the issue to Intel, for starts (assuming you have the most current NIC driver and whatever Intel calls the "Advanced Network Services" drivers today). There's no configuration that you should be able to cause that kind of misbehaviour with!
I suppose you could assign four (4) IP addresses to the NICs (breaking them out of the team, of course) and try to load-balance that way, but that's awfully hack-ish. The team would really be the cleanest thing.
We tried teaming in our datacenter at one point to provide redundancy in the event of switch failure. Long story short, switches don't often fail, but Intel NIC drivers do.
I would highly recommend finding another solution.
Looking closely at Intel NIC docs, it appears that using windows built-in ops, such as disable/enable a network connection, or any of the device driver ops are ILLEGAL when you have created a team.
Rather, manage team as a whole via device manager plug-in, by double clicking on the team device.
And, of course, having trunking / LAG on switch helps tremendously.