Load balancing between ethernetcards

Hi,

I got an Open-E DSS server with 6 ethernet ports, 2 and 2 are bundled in active/passive and each bundle is has ips in separate subnets and each bundle is used for separate type of traffic

The config now:
bundle 1 (eth0/1) = 10.50.189.50/24 = mgmt + cifs
bundle 2 (eth2/3) = 10.50.190.50/24 = iscsi
bundle 3 (eth4/5) = 10.50.191.50/24 = nfs

The thing that I was wondering is it possible to set all interfaces in the same subnet and assign each vmware server to separate iscsi targets to staticaly load balance the traffic between the ports so I can get a dedikated 1G link to each server ? (I only got 2 vmware servers) Will this work at all ? (The main usage is iSCSI so th nfs/cifs I only use for testing and do not need to have separate interfaces)

Or do you have a feature like Equallogic that has a "group ip" that is used as a target and then that one redirects the traffic to one of the other ips of the EQ appliance to balance the load between the interfaces (the EQ has one group IP + 3 ethernet cards with 1 ip each, all in the same subnet)

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Rasmus Fauske

Quote:

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Originally Posted by rfauske

Hi,

I got an Open-E DSS server with 6 ethernet ports, 2 and 2 are bundled in active/passive and each bundle is has ips in separate subnets and each bundle is used for separate type of traffic
[...]
The thing that I was wondering is it possible to set all interfaces in the same subnet and assign each vmware server to separate iscsi targets to staticaly load balance the traffic between the ports so I can get a dedikated 1G link to each server ? (I only got 2 vmware servers) Will this work at all ? (The main usage is iSCSI so th nfs/cifs I only use for testing and do not need to have separate interfaces)

Or do you have a feature like Equallogic that has a "group ip" that is used as a target and then that one redirects the traffic to one of the other ips of the EQ appliance to balance the load between the interfaces (the EQ has one group IP + 3 ethernet cards with 1 ip each, all in the same subnet)

--
Rasmus Fauske

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Rasmus,

have you looked at the various channel bundling options, esp. 802.3ad? That should give you load balancing across two or more active/active links, if your switch supports this. You'd then have a single bond0 interface with a single IP and since you use two client machines, the connections should be assigned to different network interfaces.

Using IPs from the same subnet for multiple interfaces of the DSS does enable load balancing for incoming traffic only - all traffic from DSS to the server will most probably use the interface with the default route. So if you have only high write traffic, but fairly low read traffic to/from the iSCSI devices, you'd be fine. (Just kidding - that should be an extremely rare case :D )

With regards,
Jens

Quote:

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Originally Posted by jmo

Rasmus,

have you looked at the various channel bundling options, esp. 802.3ad? That should give you load balancing across two or more active/active links, if your switch supports this. You'd then have a single bond0 interface with a single IP and since you use two client machines, the connections should be assigned to different network interfaces.

Using IPs from the same subnet for multiple interfaces of the DSS does enable load balancing for incoming traffic only - all traffic from DSS to the server will most probably use the interface with the default route. So if you have only high write traffic, but fairly low read traffic to/from the iSCSI devices, you'd be fine. (Just kidding - that should be an extremely rare case :D )

With regards,
Jens

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Well, that depends on various things. First, if your switch, like mine only handles 802.3ad using some kind of XOR operation, you won't see any speed bump at all. That has been discussed several time on this forum and I suggest that you take your time and read through the respective threads.

In essence: if you want better performance, buy faster network equipment, like a 10 GbE card.

You can achieve what you actually want, to have the to VMs connected through "seperated" lines, using 802.3ad though. You maybe have to do some math with your IP addresses, but that depends on how your switch "routes" the packets initially. If yo do that right, you can take advantage of up to the number of trunk members you have, but each connection will only run at the speed of that physical connection.

Cheers,
budy

Quote:

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Originally Posted by budy

[...] That has been discussed several time on this forum and I suggest that you take your time and read through the respective threads.[...]

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budy,

was that aimed at me?

Regards,
Jens

As far as I know it is not possible to create two 802.3ad and run active passive between the two trunks ? (since I also need failover and you cant create one 802.3ad bundle with one interface in each switch)

The point of this thread for my part is to know if it is possible to bind traffic to separate ethernetcards using separate ips or maybe automaticaly as the EQ does it. (all iscsi traffic is in one subnet så the issue with return traffic going through one adapter)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by rfauske

you cant create one 802.3ad bundle with one interface in each switch

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I think you can actually have one interface in each of two switches using 802.3ad if your switches support being bound together as one virtual switch.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by jmo

budy,

was that aimed at me?

Regards,
Jens

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Jens, no sorry - didn't meant to mix that up. That was meant to addressed to rfauske.


Cheers,
budy

Hello, you could enable MPIO support in ESXi (I use ESXi 4) and enabling MPIO allows the traffic to be round-robin load balanced across multiple connections between open-e and your vmware server. This was something like a 4 click operation, once you had already assigned a VMKernel port and IP to the adapter on ESXi.

There are some very good how-to's in the support/documentation section of the open-e website.

Hope this helps,

TFZ