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  3. Master and Slave Over 10G

  • Master and Slave Over 10G

    L
    L

    Hello All,

    I previously wrote a post about this topic and still haven't got an answer to this day, but I admit it was a quite specific and tough, mainly about methods of aggregations with 10Gb/s ethernet with a Master and Slave set up.

    Well today my question is simply this:

    Is there any of you that has experience with VEP and Master and Slave configuration over 10Gb/s Ethernet, instead of using normal Cat6 Gigabit Ethernet?

    I am in the process of starting to build a big set up using VEP 5 (probably upgrade it to 6) using 1 master Windows 10 Pro PC and three Slave Windows 10 Pro PCs. Quite a powerful set up, but being completely new to Vienna's capabilities, I have no real life experience with setting up any of it.

    The rational is that I want to limit to the minimum my bottlenek when it comes to streaming from my slave machines, as I have quite an extensive VST library and palette (ergo the three slave machines) and I want my template to be snappy and load relatively fast as the deadlines creep up on me. So that's why the 10Gb/s connection instead of the more common (and cheaper) gigabit.

    So, if any of you is and has used 10G (Cat7) solutions to connect their masters with the slaves, I'd like to know how, what kind of switch is needed, is it even needed, does VEP supports 10G at all. All these things and more, if you have real life experience with it.

    Thank you so much in advance, friends.
  • S
    S

    Wondering if you tried this? 
  • N
    N

    Did anyone try this? I'm in the same spot now, building slaves and wondering if I need 10 Gigabit to avoid bottlenecks. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
  • BillB
    BillB

    In the past, VSL has said that there is nothing to be gained. I haven't seen any reports from anyone who's used it.

    Dorico, Notion, Sibelius, StudioOne, Cubase, Staffpad VE Pro, Synchon, VI, Kontakt Win11 x64, 64GB RAM, Focusrite Scarlett 18i20, August Forster 190
  • N
    N
    last edited
    last edited

    @Bill said:

    In the past, VSL has said that there is nothing to be gained. I haven't seen any reports from anyone who's used it.

    And what if I have 300+ tracks steaming from slave PCs. Would there be bottlenecks or worse latency? @moderator I have not seen any discussion on this topic in this forum. Can someone shed some light?
  • O
    O

    Hello

    from IT point of view:

    300 Streams at 24bit/96khz would just start to saturate your 1G link (with about 600Mbit) driving up the latency depending on the quality of the 1G NICs involved, some consumer models might cause spikes already with 70% bandwidth load, assuming you are using ONE slave for that kind of workload.

    So usually this is not an issue with most users I would think, but in your case theoretically could start to be a factor.

    10G has lower base link/transfer latency though, but really the best you could expect is below 0.1 ms gain vs 1G, so again under most circumstances not worth any effort.

    So if you really have a massive setup of tracks being steramed realtime you can use a 1:1 10G connection between Workstation and client/server without a switch involved, limiting cost and setup. But do never use "onboard" 10G nics unless they are professional devices from Intel or Broadcom...never

    If Reverbs/insert DSP effects were streamed over VEP (which I would not do anyway) then 10G might be more useful from latency perspective, but this is not the scenario here.
  • N
    N

    Thanks @Onyxyl for your reply.

    I did setup my Slaves with an Intel 1:1 10G Lan card. Libraries dumped on RAID 0 arrays of SSDs. No problem here running 300 tracks (approx.) at zero buffer per instance (48kHz, 64-bit float).

    Works like a Charm :) No hiccups at all.
  • C
    C

    Great to hear.

    Which 10G lan cards did you purchase ? Can you kindly share the model, so that I can do the same.

    Regards

    Ram