bonding querry (balance-alb)

[ambad4u]

greetings,

I'll try this here hope someone will be able to answer or point me to the right direction.

here is the scenario: lets say I have a 'diskless server' (will be virtuallized essentially), this specific server serves workstations without physical disk to be able to boot windows. However, with diskless technology, the ethernet/nics are the most being hammered with heavy workloads, 2nd is the harddisk (if they are plater based) while the processor mostly sleeps.

Mostly and currently with these diskless software, only 1 ethernet/nic is used, never seen they use more than 1 'natively'.
What if I have 3 identical ethernet/nics which supports bonding (specifically balance-alb) and bond them together?, and a thing to note that I only have a 'dumb' single switch (no lacp support)


am not expecting miracles here but my question(s) are:
-- does bonding help out in the scenario above?
-- compared to single connection vs bonding 2 or more on a regular switch, is there improvement in speed and/or load?

 

[manu]

The most critical part is the boot, in which all your Windows VM will need to read from the network somethin like 200 MB if I remember correctly.
If I understand right balance-alb can help you, it will not increase the throughput available to your VM, but it should reduce the chance of the Gigabit link on the Proxmox side to become saturated. I haven't tested myself though.
I advise you to test this with iperf before putting this into production.

 

[ambad4u]

thanks for such inputs, I'll try to note with what you have said with iperf, I hope I can complete what I'm making.

anyways, its just that with diskless softwares, they utilize a single ethernet port on the server of which is distributed to clients like 10 to 20 diskless workstations or even more! thus it will indeed saturate the single nic, yet, if they require it not to be saturated, they just create another diskless server as putting lacp switches seems too much expensive (as another expensive option)

still cant imagine if having a bond (2x nics) would be beneficial on such settings vs a single nic. although I know theoretically it will relieve the stress on the nics as you have said.