Office Network speed query

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youngest.steve

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Jan 29, 2018
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My workplace is looking at a redesign of its network to see if a more efficient design will help lessen or mitigate latency problems that periodically arise. I've done a bit of research and I thought I'd ask on here for a bit of advice.

Currently all of our employee computers (Thin Clients) connect through Cat5 Ethernet cables to floor panels and then to a patch panel and out from there. I've proposed that rather than have each workstation routed individually to a port that instead they would, in groups of 4, be connected to a switch which would then run a single cable to the patch panel, maybe with a Cat6 cable to handle the traffic. There are 26 computers and 2 printers, so instead of taking up 28 ports on the patch panel this could be reduced to 7.

What I want to know is basically would this do anything? Would adding switches make an improvement to traffic speed over every computer being routed directly?
 
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kanewolf

kanewolf

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If you use thin clients, then your slowdowns are not because of your networking. Thin clients don't require much network bandwidth. Your problems are back at the server side. Maybe your VMs don't have enough RAM or the servers are overloaded in general.
 
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bill001g

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Not sure what you think you currently have but the PC must be connected to some form of switch. A patch panel or other panel is just wiring.

If what you are calling a patch panel is actually a switch then that is the best option. Each machine will likely have a gigabit connection to every other machine. Most modern switches can pass data between the ports with no delay so a 24 port switch can send 1gigbit and receive 1gigabit on all port all at the same time....passing 48gbits of traffic.

Adding another layer of switches will just slow you down. You now have 4 devices sharing a single gigabit cable to the central hub rather than each having their own.

Now if you have really old crap 100mbps switches the replacing the central one with a gigabit switch might help. It all depends how much traffic is being send and as pointed out above thin clients use very little.
 
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youngest.steve

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Thanks for the advice, and yeah you're right I meant a switch (I'm pretty new to this field and still tripping up on terminology), from the sounds of it then our network in the office itself is pretty robust. For reference the central switch I was confusing as a patch panel is a NETGEAR FS752TS, not sure how that stacks up in terms of quality though.



Our file servers are in an external data center and maintained by another company, are you saying the issues we have with system speed, latency, and freezes would be something to do with their end?

The specs for the server are:

OS: Windows Server 2012 R2
Processor - Intel Xeon CPU E5-2420 v2 @ 2.2GHz (12 processors)
RAM: 60.0 GB

Do you think this might be too low spec for the current amount of users?
 
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youngest.steve

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That's kind of the issue with the network setup at the minute - When I say an external data center I mean one that's a good half hour drive away, all of our connection is Internet based beyond the router, so we're dependent on a stable connection at all times.
The problem there becomes if there's a spike or anything like a packet drop it could be any number of things, the majority of which are out of our control. I don't suppose you'd know how (if at all) I could go about finding out the link from us to the servers?
 
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bill001g

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Your switch is only 100mbits which is kinda old tech but it likely does not matter. Since you have no local traffic between the machines and all the traffic goes to a remote server that connection that would be the bottleneck ...maybe.

Your first step is to find out from your ISP what connection speed you have purchased. You might be exceeding the bandwidth. Many ISP have monitoring tools that can tell you how much you are using and some routers also have that feature.

In general there is no guarantee of bandwidth when you run over the internet. All use the magic words "UP TO". If you are not over using your connection then it likely is something in the path between you and the server.

This is why many business buy a better class of connection. It is a form of VPN but it does not really run over the internet. It is generically called MPLS but there are a number of offering. These type of connections the provider will guarantee both latency and bandwidth as well as things like 24x7 support. They cost a lot more than a generic internet connection but when down time costs money a lot of companies will pay the fee just so they do not have problems.
 
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failboat

failboat

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All of your thin clients are hosted remotely or just file servers? What software are you using for VDI, e.g. citrix or vmware? If you are paying for a desktop-as-a-service then you should be asking your provider. What type of latency are you experiencing?
 
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youngest.steve

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All hosted remotely, we also have a database on another server which is used through a front end on Windows, and from what I can see all the thin clients connect through RDP, although again I'm probably looking at the wrong thing. We just seem to be hitting a lot of bottlenecks and temporary freezeups, particularly when writing or working with the database. I reckon I need to get a lot more information on this, like I said I'm new to this field and the network was set up ages ago before I started here, so I don't have the full spec.
 
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failboat

failboat

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The only thing locally you can adjust is how clearly you see the streamed desktop, your network just has to handle those connections. The inbound bitrate on the stream probably isn't changing if you are using a database. Any LAN latency, outbound traffic, or machine specs would all be issues at the datacenter where it's hosted. If you are paying money for this service then I feel like they should be able to troubleshoot.
 
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