Network Cofiguration with External SAN/NAS for HA cluster

[afrugone]

I've 7 physical servers limited to 4 1G NICs on each, besides I have received a Storage that supports iSCSI or NFS, the storage has 2 controllers with 4 1G NICs on eache controller, to create a HA cluster with Proxmox 4, I understand that I`ll need three different networks:

• Network for internal cluster communication
• one network for VM traffic, to provide service to users
• one network for storage traffic

So my question is, what's is better and safer, bond all NICs and define different VLANs for each network or use one physical NIC for each network traffic?

If bonding is ok, what kind bond is better active-active or active-passive?

Thanks for your comments

 

[Mr.Holmes]

Hello afrugone,

I've 7 physical servers limited to 4 1G NICs on each, besides I have received a Storage that supports iSCSI or NFS, the storage has 2 controllers with 4 1G NICs on eache controller, to create a HA cluster with Proxmox 4, I understand that I`ll need three different networks:

Network for internal cluster communication
one network for VM traffic, to provide service to users
one network for storage traffic

Quite right!

So my question is, what's is better and safer, bond all NICs and define different VLANs for each network or use one physical NIC for each network traffic?

Three physical LANs (and no VLANs)! Since you have 4 NICs you may bond two of them to one of these three.

If bonding is ok, what kind bond is better active-active or active-passive?

The most cirtical is storage traffic, in order to keep it secure I would use "active-backup"

Kind regards

Mr.Holmes

 

[afrugone]

Hi Mr Holmes,

Many thanks for your comments, so for storage active-active bonding is not safe configuration? as my interfaces are only 1G and The Switches support LACP and layer 3, I thought could be a good idea to improve bandwith loadbalance bonding two or more interfaces could help, but if in your experience it's not safe, i'll follow your recommendation.

Thanks

 

[Mr.Holmes]

Hello afrugone,

Many thanks for your comments, so for storage active-active bonding is not safe configuration?

I would not say it directly like this - but LACP (you should use rather active-passive then) needs support on the switch side, and my experience is that you cannot trust all switches. Active-Backup on the other hand is simple and don´t need any special support.

as my interfaces are only 1G and The Switches support LACP and layer 3, I thought could be a good idea to improve bandwith loadbalance bonding two or more interfaces could help, but if in your experience it's not safe, i'll follow your recommendation.

Understood - but even when LACP works correctly it does not double the bandwidth. Balancing algorithms are complicate and based on source-destination relation. When you have always the same (from host to fileserver) bonding is not an improvement in bandwidth. But depends on your situation, you can try and investigate the traffic.

If 1Gbit/s is really too less you should spend the effort for 10Gb/s.

Kind regards

Mr.Holmes

 

[manu]

Hi
The active-backup mode is a good choice for this kind of setup, it gives you redundancy on the Ethernet Link without any kind of setup needed on the Switch itself.
See https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/networking/bonding.txt for details.