> From: opensolaris-discuss-boun...@opensolaris.org [mailto:opensolaris- > discuss-boun...@opensolaris.org] On Behalf Of valrh...@gmail.com > > I actually have two ethernet ports on the server, so in principle I > should be able to use automatic link-aggregation in OSOL to do this, > right? If I understand correctly, the two adapters get teamed, and only > require a single IP address, right?
You're 95% right. Here are the caveats you'll want to know about: With LACP, each data stream can only go as fast as a single network interface. So if you have aggregated 2x 1G adapters, you won't see 2G speeds. But you might be able to get 2 separate clients to each talk 1G with the server. Your switch must support it too. Configuring it (at least in sol10, but maybe it's different in osol) is a bitch. Because you have to unplumb your interface in order to add it to an aggregation group with another interface, and solaris behaves *very* poorly when there is no plumbed network interface. When one port is fully utilized, and another client comes along and tries to establish another connection, and that client already had a data stream on the same port which is already fully utilized, so the system has a new desire to move one of the datastreams to the unutilized network interface ... This is where I have experienced problems. And it happens all the time (like literally all the time) because that's the whole point of even bothering to implement it. LACP doesn't know that one of the datastreams should be re-assigned to the other interface, until the traffic appears on the overloaded interface. When LACP decides to reassign the traffic to the other interface, an error packet is issued, and the previously received packet must be re-transmitted. You see this occurring by watching the interface error counter increasing. Lots of traffic will not care about the error counter. Lots of people use LACP and don't even notice a problem. But I do file transfers, and ssh tunnels all over the place, and these error occurrences cause dropped and stalled connections. My advice to you is: Watch the error counter on your network interfaces, and if it's anything other than zero, abandon LACP. _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
