IP Series VMC1 Network setup best practice

[tjn]

Hi everyone

I am currently working on our second vmc1 installation. In our first setup the VMC1 and the expansion modules are in an isolated network, together with all the NDI cameras and equipment. Now for the second installation, I am planing to establish a connection to the interne. This will allow us to use more feature like remote controls and Skype TX, plus it will make maintenance easier since we can directly download updates from the interne and do remote reboots etc. Does anyone have experiences with this? For example I am wondering if you would connect the VMCI one to two different subnets, one with all the NDI stuff and another just with very restricted internet access. Or would you again put all the devices into the same network and use the different network cards for redundancy and more throughput.

In general I am very curious how your network setup is looking around the VMC1 and the NC1 modules, since there is no "best practice" setup given.

Best,
Tim

 

[doctorsunshine]

On the VMC1 it's quite easy to manage, at least much easier than on the TC-1 , since you have 2 x 10Gb and 2 x 1Gb. so, depending of your NDI set-up, you could even use the 2 x 10Gb ports for NDI, which would give you a lot of BW and redundancy over the two NICs, and dedicate a 1Gb port for internet access.

On TC1, you have much more to think about the best way to use the 2 x 1Gb NICs.....

Best,

Jerome

 

[kanep]

The one thing to watch out for on the VMC1 is to make sure that both a 1GbE and 10GbE interface cannot get to the same NDI destination. NDI has support for multiple Ethernet links, but if one link is lower speed than the other, the total bandwidth will be limited by the slowest link.

So having something like Jerome mentions above where the NDI network connects via 10GbE link and the Internet/House network is on a 1GbE link it okay. But if your network was setup in some way where both the 10GbE and 1GbE could see the NDI network, that would be bad.

What can catch you is something like a VMC1 and NC1 both connected to the 10GbE NDI network and 1GbE 'Internet/House' network. You might think this is okay, but the NDI source can be seen on both networks (each system is connected to both networks, so either network can transfer NDI data), which is going to cause the issue I'm describing unless additional steps are taken to make sure NDI isn't transferred over the 'Internet/House' network.

 

[doctorsunshine]

The one thing to watch out for on the VMC1 is to make sure that both a 1GbE and 10GbE interface cannot get to the same NDI destination. NDI has support for multiple Ethernet links, but if one link is lower speed than the other, the total bandwidth will be limited by the slowest link.

Interesting to know. I just checked in the latest 3.8 SDK documentation, and could not see anything about this....

You might think this is okay, but the NDI source can be seen on both networks (each system is connected to both networks, so either network can transfer NDI data), which is going to cause the issue I'm describing unless additional steps are taken to make sure NDI isn't transferred over the 'Internet/House' network.

Unfortunately, as far as I know it's still very difficult to block NDI traffic to only a specific NIC..... we definitely need something in Access Manager to select the NIC(s) concerned with NDI, like with have in Dante Virtual Soundcard for example....

Jerome