New Network Issues

[NB9457]

In a primary, we have just put in all new CAT6 cabling and HP switches in a central location. When I linked all the switches up, all 6 dasiy chained one off the other, with the last in the chain being completely empty, so I thought it would be best to use the empty HP switch, to connect the other switches and server and act as a core if you will.

 

Now the switches are gigabit and the speeds don't seem great, around 5-10MB/s from client to client, I was expecting somewhere of at least above 50MB/s, could it be due to the speed of the client disks (7200rpm) or the switch config/arrangement?

 

Also I'm wondering if I should keep the empty switch acting as a 'core' or daisy chain them, unless they offer a stacking feature? I'm not sure.

 

Any help/advice is appreciated.

[uktonyn]

you don't really want to chain network Switches unless they are designed to do it with some sort of stacking facility. In which case the "stack is seen as a single entitiy. I would advise to use a core. What switches are they?

 

Tony N

[FN-GM]

The daisy chaining is a big no as the previous poster said. You should purchase switches that are stackable.

 

Can you send all the design stuff over and we can take a look.

[witch]

One of the first things i did in one of my jobs was to get rid of as much daisy chaining as possible. So now I have one switch that connects to the outside as it were and then each switch connects directly to that one. It was the best I could do with the organisation and switches that were there.

[PotNoodleTech]

In an ideal world, you would have a core switch at the centre of you're star network, you're servers and all other switches would connect directly to this core switch. No daisy chaining. Clearly, the core switch should be more powerful than the switches at the edge, e/g my one is 10Gig core, and then lots of 1 gig edge switches connected via a mixture of Ethernet and fibre.

 

Now that's the ideal world, I still haven't quote got there yet as I still have a few edge switches that are daisy chained, as having fibre runs put in for them are quite cost prohibitive. I'll get it done and perfect one day though. I'm trying to do one per year!

[twin--turbo]

At my last place we had a large company do the cisco install on the sister site. I had not seen the design but it was supposed to mirror the main site. It took 8 months for them to supply the switch password, and less than 2hrs for me to discover that there was daisy chaining 7 layers deep!! It was supposed to be Core -> Distro -> Edge with redundant links. Nothing was redundant.

 

When I questioned this with the supposed "CISCO" expert he said it was fine.

 

I asked for two second opinions from CCNA's . They said it was appalling.

 

It was reworked!!

 

 

As for the OP: , it can sometimes be difficult to simulate network load. Are all the edge switches 1Gb, are all the PC's 1Gb?

 

TT

[NB9457]

At least I feel relieved I got rid of the chain, I thought it was generally bad practice.

 

Whilst there is no core switch per say, I have treated one of the spare HP Switches as a core switch if you will, all the switches are connected via this unit, including the server, WiFi controller, NAS backup and anything else of relative importance.

 

All PCs are indeed gigabit.

 

Here is a general jist of how I rejigged it to give an idea. They were initially linked one off another as said before!

 

http://i.imgur.com/stiGVn6.png?1

[twin--turbo]

The HDD's will shovel data faster than the LAN.

 

Theoretically you should get 125MB/s straight transfer but it's never likely to get to that. So it sounds like there is a problem. Common issues would be loops and duplex/speed mismatches.

 

What models are the switches.

 

TT

[LytchettNM]

There are stacks of advice that can be offered but start at the basics, it looks like you have 3 edge switches and a switch you have setup as a core model numbers of the switches would be good and your ip range and subnet used would also be great.

How many Ethernet ports do you have on the server/s backup drives and wifi controller again spec would help?

Assuming that you have not changed the port configurations of the switches and they are all the same make linking the edge switches to the core switch with one cable then the ports should auto negotiate which is good, but if the switches are different makes then it might be better to fix speed and duplex on all the ports used to connect the switches together.

I would also recommend enabling spanning tree if you have this option but only on ports facing workstations.