Link Aggregation or just use Active-Backup

[greavette]

Hello,

Looking for advice from the community here.

In our small office we are using Bonded Nics with Active-Backup currently. We have two Dell Powerconnect (5548) switches that are stacked (linked). I have the two bonded cables from our Proxmox Server going to each switch. So far so good.

Our office is small and don't have a lot of network traffic, but we are looking at replacing our individual workstations with Virtual Machines and using Thin Clients to connect into the VM's. I'm a little concerned about slowing down our network with the added traffic of 15 workstations run virtually.

Is there a benefit with regards to throughput if we used 802.3ad (Link Aggregation) on these bonded Nics. Our switches can handle Link Aggregation.

Thoughts?

 

[mir]

Active-backup means if the active goes down the backup will take over unnoticed to sessions but only one nic is active at any given time. 802.3ad means both nics are active at any given time which means sessions can flow over both nics in parallel however, this does not mean that traffic in a session can flow over both nics concurrently only that more bandwidth will be available for sessions since both nics are active at the same time.

Eg.
active-backup: active/passive mode
802.3ad: active/active mode

So for your use case I would recommend 802.3ad.

 

[greavette]

Thanks very much for the reply.

Would changing my bonded nick from Active-Backup to 802.3ad require a reboot of my host server?

Thank you.

 

[mir]

Thanks very much for the reply.

Would changing my bonded nick from Active-Backup to 802.3ad require a reboot of my host server?

Thank you.

Yes, when you need to change bond configuration a reboot is required.

 

[greavette]

Thanks very much mir for your help.

 

[Raymond Burns]

I am using 802.3ad on my hosts, and I can testify that it is saturating 1.8gbits to my OmniOS ZFS NAS. Of course, it must be supported by the switch.
I have a DGS-3200 to support my storage backend, and the link ports are set to "Active-Active" mode. Then they are trunk together using LACP. Works great. I may have to do 3 ports on my NAS to facilitate the Proxmox hosts using LACP

 

[greavette]

Thank you Raymond for your reply.


Our Powerconnect Dell Switch does have LAG support. I've made the necessary changes to the ports on our switches so that the two nics on our proxmox server can now be put into 802.3ad mode.


Thank you.