Quote 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
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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
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 )

With regards,
Jens