Recieve-side scaling disabled in team even though they all say they support it?

[idata]

Ok so we just rebuilt our file server and we have have

1X Intel Pro1000 ET Quad Gigabit Ethernet Adapter

1X Intel Pro1000 PT Quad Gigabit Ethernet Adapter

I can team all of the nics on the PT card together or I can team all of the nics on the ET card together. But, if I try to team all together I get an error saying:

One or more adapters in the team do not support true NDIS6.20

Recieve-Side Scaling. Recieve-Side Scaling will be disabled for theteam. Disabling Recieve-Side Scaling will negativly impact the performance of the team.

This is under Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 BTW.

But when I goto the page on the topic on the intel site both cards are lited as supporting this feature.

So these are my questions.

Will performace suffer? Will having all 8 nics teamed be slower than just the 4 on the ET card team together?

Which card is the offender? I would assume that it is the PT, since it does not have Recieve-Side Scaling Queues.

As for the ET card I have it set to that There are 4 queues. Since I only have have 4 cores in the system and there are only 4 nics one the ET card. This seemed logical no?

[idata]

jbbarnette427 -

Sorry you are running into this problem. Could you possibily list the driver name and version that you have loaded on these two network adapters? There were some changes to RSS between NDIS 6.20 and previous NDIS 6.x versions, and this might be the cause. Thank you for using Intel Ethernet.

Cheers,

-- miles

[idata]

I installed this driver and all of the nics in the server seem to be using it.

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=18725&ProdId=3035&lang=eng

[Mark_H_Intel]

http://www.intel.com/support/network/sb/CS-031099.htm Message about true NDIS 6.20 receive-side scaling when configuring a team has an explanation, but does not answer all your questions. The Intel(R) PRO/1000 PT Quad Port Server adapter does notsupport true NDIS 6.20 Receive-Side Scaling. The Intel(R) PRO/1000 ET Quad Port Server does support support true NDIS 6.20 Receive-Side Scaling. Either adapter supports RSS in Windows Server 2008 R2; however, because the support is different in each adapter, they cannot do RSS when teamed together.

If you disable RSS on the team, you will take a performance hit. The difference in performance between teaming the 8 ports without RSS versus teaming just 4 ports with RSS would have to be tested in your system with examples of your real-time traffic.

If you need the bandwidth of 8 gigabit ports in a Link Aggregation Team, then your best bet is to use two adapters of the same type instead of mixing the adapters.

I hope this helps you.

Mark H