measuring file access times over WAN

hertz

Hi,

I'm a sysadmin for an office in a company in Ireland. We have another office in the US. Some of my users access files on file servers in this US office over the WAN using a secure MPLS VPN connection. Everything is in the same domain so we just have to map a network drive to the US server.

I'm getting reports that accessing files over the WAN to this US server are poor, taking ages to read/write etc.

Is there a tool I can use to monitor the connection to this US server and guage whether there is a bottle neck along the WAN be it at the network layer or across the Internet?

I would add I'm not the most experienced with Cisco devices.

Any advise would be welcome.
thanks
Hertz

Mr. Fancypants

You could use some file copy tests to check the bandwidth in an unscientific way. Having file shares over remote vpns do tend to be slow though especially if users experience a local file share also for comparison. It may be worth your while looking into DFS or WAN accelerators.

Static M.e.

As above. I don't really have any specific tools to look at that.

If its between two sites then you could you look at Trialling some WAN accelerators, I know Riverbed use to offer long trials (2/3 months).

hertz

Thanks

I spotted we can only ping a packet size of 20kb over the VPN link. This is why file access is slow.
We've implemented DFS and it's greatly improved the performance.