Re: [Veritas-bu] Nic Utilization
Hi Heather If you have Cisco switches you can use EtherChannel (PAgP) which is very similar to LACP for port aggregation - you would want to load balance by source MAC. This should benefit your media servers depending on what backup devices they are writing to. You will also the need some kind of multipathing/load balancing software running on your backup servers. If your master server is a dedicated master you should simply configure it for failover as a 1Gb nic should be more than enough. What backup devices do you have on your media servers? If you have anything which can write faster than about 60 Mb p/s you should definitely get some load balancing setup The bp.conf setting will push data out of a specific interface on the client itself where possible so you would really be able to control which interface it goes to on the media server. You could add entries into the clients hosts file so different client send data to different interfaces on the server but that creates single points of failures and is a little messy Cheers Tal -Original Message- From: veritas-bu-boun...@mailman.eng.auburn.edu [mailto:veritas-bu-boun...@mailman.eng.auburn.edu] On Behalf Of Heathe Kyle Yeakley Sent: 08 April 2010 21:34 To: Veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu Subject: [Veritas-bu] Nic Utilization I had a question about how everyone else utilizes the NICs inside your master and media servers. I have 1 master and 2 media. Like most systems these days, I have 3-4 NICs in each one. The administrator that setup our existing environment plumbed 1 NIC per machine, and the other NICs sit there, completely unused. At night, when our backup are running, it isn't unheard of for the NICs on all three machine to reach a high utilization level. This got me to thinking. I've read that you can set an option in the bp.conf file and have various clients backup to different interfaces on the same physical master and/or media server, but I've never actually deployed that feature. I've also heard of a technology called Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) that allows you to tie multiple NICs together to increase the total bandwidth into your server. Does anyone else employ these technologies? Does everyone else just plumb one NIC and let the backups trickle in as fast as the LAN allows? Is there other aggregation technology out there that folks are using to utilize and squeeze more bandwidth out of those unused NICs? Thanks. - Heathe Kyle Yeakley ___ Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu ___ Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu
[Veritas-bu] Nic Utilization
I had a question about how everyone else utilizes the NICs inside your master and media servers. I have 1 master and 2 media. Like most systems these days, I have 3-4 NICs in each one. The administrator that setup our existing environment plumbed 1 NIC per machine, and the other NICs sit there, completely unused. At night, when our backup are running, it isn't unheard of for the NICs on all three machine to reach a high utilization level. This got me to thinking. I've read that you can set an option in the bp.conf file and have various clients backup to different interfaces on the same physical master and/or media server, but I've never actually deployed that feature. I've also heard of a technology called Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) that allows you to tie multiple NICs together to increase the total bandwidth into your server. Does anyone else employ these technologies? Does everyone else just plumb one NIC and let the backups trickle in as fast as the LAN allows? Is there other aggregation technology out there that folks are using to utilize and squeeze more bandwidth out of those unused NICs? Thanks. - Heathe Kyle Yeakley ___ Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu
Re: [Veritas-bu] Nic Utilization
Heathe, I'm guessing many people use some level of port aggregation on their servers. The methods to do this vary based on the OS of your servers and the model of switches you have. Linux often goes under the name Channel Bonding while HPUX calls it Port Aggregation. Basically the switch and the server group connections together into one logical link. You will still have one host name and won't need to fool with anything else. You'll need to do some research on how to do it with your OS and make sure your switches are set to the proper setting. We trashed our network pretty badly one time when things were not set correctly (older switches looping) so make sure you do it right :-) Jeff On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 2:33 PM, Heathe Kyle Yeakley hkyeak...@gmail.comwrote: I had a question about how everyone else utilizes the NICs inside your master and media servers. I have 1 master and 2 media. Like most systems these days, I have 3-4 NICs in each one. The administrator that setup our existing environment plumbed 1 NIC per machine, and the other NICs sit there, completely unused. At night, when our backup are running, it isn't unheard of for the NICs on all three machine to reach a high utilization level. This got me to thinking. I've read that you can set an option in the bp.conf file and have various clients backup to different interfaces on the same physical master and/or media server, but I've never actually deployed that feature. I've also heard of a technology called Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) that allows you to tie multiple NICs together to increase the total bandwidth into your server. Does anyone else employ these technologies? Does everyone else just plumb one NIC and let the backups trickle in as fast as the LAN allows? Is there other aggregation technology out there that folks are using to utilize and squeeze more bandwidth out of those unused NICs? Thanks. - Heathe Kyle Yeakley ___ Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu -- Jeff Cleverley Unix Systems Administrator 4380 Ziegler Road Fort Collins, Colorado 80525 970-288-4611 ___ Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu
Re: [Veritas-bu] Nic Utilization
Hello, We had a simple setup with several file servers (AFS) and one master / media server and one robot with two drives. The file servers and the master / media server were connected via eth0 or bge0 actually to the regular LAN. But eth1 bge1 was connected to a private switch. The afs file servers were configured to only use eth0 or bge0 and the bge1 eth1 nic was assigned a private host name. (/etc/hosts) Netbackup was configured with the clients to use these private names, eg: real name engr06f and then we have engr06f-prv. Netbackup used engr06f-prv, so all the backups went over the private network. I understand this setup is pretty common. The gentleman who set it up in the first place told me that as I inherited it when he moved to greener pastures. :) Now another group runs a bigger netbackup system that we hook into here at NCSU and it has lots of media servers. But now everything (file server stuff and backups) runs on the primary nic and the other ports go unused. But because they have more (virtual) tape drives the backups go much faster because it can run 5 streams for 5 partitions. We don't see issues with the file servers being noticeably slower during backups with the new setup. We're backing up about 2TB of data total with these servers. Hope that helped. Gary Gatling | ITECS Systems ITECS, BOX 7901 | Operations and Systems Analyst NCSU, Raleigh, NC | Email: gsgat...@eos.ncsu.edu 27695-7901| Phone: (919) 513-4572 (5C Page Hall) On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 2:33 PM, Heathe Kyle Yeakley hkyeak...@gmail.com wrote: I had a question about how everyone else utilizes the NICs inside your master and media servers. I have 1 master and 2 media. Like most systems these days, I have 3-4 NICs in each one. The administrator that setup our existing environment plumbed 1 NIC per machine, and the other NICs sit there, completely unused. At night, when our backup are running, it isn't unheard of for the NICs on all three machine to reach a high utilization level. This got me to thinking. I've read that you can set an option in the bp.conf file and have various clients backup to different interfaces on the same physical master and/or media server, but I've never actually deployed that feature. I've also heard of a technology called Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) that allows you to tie multiple NICs together to increase the total bandwidth into your server. Does anyone else employ these technologies? Does everyone else just plumb one NIC and let the backups trickle in as fast as the LAN allows? Is there other aggregation technology out there that folks are using to utilize and squeeze more bandwidth out of those unused NICs? Thanks. - Heathe Kyle Yeakley ___ Veritas-bu maillist - veritas...@mailman.eng.auburn.edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu ___ Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu
