[114109] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: 10-GigE for servers
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Alex Thurlow)
Fri May 1 14:05:24 2009
Date: Fri, 01 May 2009 13:05:10 -0500
From: Alex Thurlow <alex@blastro.com>
To: nanog@nanog.org
In-Reply-To: <81ecd7700905011055y3fd14276pbb78c2b80882da63@mail.gmail.com>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
As long as it's not a single connection that you're looking to get over=20
1Gb, etherchannel should actually work. It uses a hash based on (I=20
believe) source and destination IP and port, so it should roughly=20
balance connections between the servers. The other option, if you're=20
using Linux, is to use balance-rr mode on the bonding driver. This=20
should deliver per-packet balancing and the switch doesn't have to know=20
anything about the bonding. Documentation for the bonding driver is here=
:
http://www.cyberciti.biz/howto/question/static/linux-ethernet-bonding-dri=
ver-howto.php
--
Alex Thurlow
Blastro Networks
http://www.blastro.com
http://www.roxwel.com
http://www.yallwire.com
On 5/1/2009 12:55 PM, Jason Shoemaker wrote:
> My company is looking for ways to improve throughput for data transfers
> between individual servers. We=92re exploring the creation of Ethercha=
nnels
> using multiple server NICs, but Etherchannel seems to have the limitati=
on of
> not supporting per-packet load-balancing, therefore limiting traffic be=
tween
> two individual hosts to 1 Gig.
>
> In most of my research, I=92ve seen 10-GigE used for traffic aggregatio=
n and
> for the =93unified fabric=94 solution that Cisco and others are pushing=
. I=92m
> interested in knowing if any of you have attempted to implement 10-GigE=
at
> the host level to improve network throughput between individual servers=
and
> what your experience was in doing so.
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Jason
>
>
--=20
Alex Thurlow
Blastro Networks
http://www.blastro.com
http://www.roxwel.com
http://www.yallwire.com
