Bond/bridge questions

[NewSysadmin]

Hello all, I'm new to Proxmox. At this point I don't think I know the right terminology to know if what I want to do is possible, so let me describe my setup and what I hope to end up with. This is in a homelab so I can do whatever is needed.

I have two Proxmox installations on separate servers. Each server has 8 gigabit ethernet ports. One server acts as a file server, the other as an application server. At the moment, all 16 of the ethernet ports are connected to a 20 port dumb gigabit switch, and another port on the switch is hooked up to my internal LAN so it has an internet connection.

What I would like to have is each of the servers use all 8 of the ethernet ports for a total of an 8 gigabit connection between the servers. Is that possible? I've done some reading about the different types of load balancing, aggregration, etc, and I'm not sure which one would actually combine all 8 ports into a single interface that I could add to the VMs so they would all have access to an 8 gigabit connection.

I'm not opposed to installing and using OpenVSwitch, if that's what's needed. I don't need to worry about failover and redundancy-it's a homelab.

My best guess at this point is to bond all of the ports into one bond, and then create a bridge with that bond? Then assign the bridge to the VMs? When I tried that, there was a problem with the management interface already having a gateway and it wouldn't let me give the bridge the same gateway.

Any help is appreciated, even if it's a 'nope, not possible'! Thanks!

 

[Klaus Steinberger]

It depends heavily on the switch you use. With an dumb switch there is just Active/passive possible (anything else will not work reliable).
you need a managed switch on which you can setup LACG groups (or you can setup a full mesh with direct connections, openvswitch can do that) _but_ don't expect too much out of it, as LACP means that the decision which interface is used for a specific connection is done on IP/MAC Address hash combination. So for a single stream you will only see 1 GBit/s _anyway_

What you can do of course is setting up different networks for example frontend and backend networks.

if you want anything faster than 1 GBit/s invest into 10 GBit network interfaces, they are not soo much expensive as you think. Even 10 GBit switches are cheapy now.

 

[NewSysadmin]

Thanks Klaus, I'll look into the 10 Gbit interfaces. Definitely overkill for what I'm looking to do, but it's fun!