ProxMox to bond or not to bond

[DAXQ]

I have a ProxMox set up that has been working wonderfully for my needs. When I originally set it up, I bonded the four network cards on the server - and it has been working fine for about a year or so [I think I had one issue where the switch wasn't up before ProxMox and the bond failed]. Was getting ready to deploy another set up very similar to this one, and much of the reading I am finding are making me think that the bond is really unnecessary in my setup (very simple LAN, running a virtual Windows AD server, and a Debian backup server that is running jobs to FreeNAS server). Reading documentation on the LAGG set up for the FreeNAS is what got me thinking I am overly complicating things, taking multiple nic interfaces from the switch, needing more expensive switches, just to do a bonded LAGG that really probably isn't doing very much for me. I do not believe I am overloading the Gig interface, and think I would rather have the 3 extra ports back. What would be the safest way to remove the bond and get back to a single interface without messing up the 5 virtual servers running on the pve node?

Thanks in advance for any input.

Or suggestions/arguments that the bond is actually doing more for me than I think and would be worth leaving in place would also be appriciated!

 

[Rudy Gevaert]

I think you need to see if you are using more than 1gbit/s first.

Are you willing to sacrifice the redundancy? TBH in 15years of working with decent server NICS I have never seen a NIC fail. (I'm sure they do, but I haven't seen it). A switch can fail (hardware/or just the uplink goes done), and I think bonding primarily protects you for that. But you are only using one switch so you don't have the added availability.

You can just unplug the unneeded ports and reuse them on the switch. Remove the unused ports from the network config. A bond interface with one port should work (I think). I think if you want to remove the bond altogether it could mean some downtime. Do you really care about it? It's maybe just a couple of seconds.

 

[H4R0]

You are not overloading anything by using bonding alone. Its also unusal that your bond failed when the switch was not up, looks like another problem to me. LACP and the other L2 methods will fallback to a single port or recover automatically, its not that the whole network will be down if the bond fails.


I had nic's failing before, even whole network pcie cards that have multiple ports.

I will not run a server without a bond but solely due to redundancy, i also try to use seperate hardware nic's. if possible.

However that does not mean that you have to bond all available ports. 2 are enough for simple redundancy.

If you need more bandwith use more ports, its as simple as that. Otherwise stick with 2.

 

[DAXQ]

Thanks guys for your input very useful information - the servers I get typically have built-in NICs and at least one added NIC Card. I am thinking I will pull two of the 4 bonded I have and remove them from the LACP on the switch freeing up two ports and leave just two for redundancy (on on the NIC and one on the builtin). The only place I have seen NICs fail are in a switch that ran for like 10 years 24/7 some ports just start acting flaky.