Can someone please point me to a few good articles on how to setup NIC bonding/teaming?

 

And/or answer a few questions:

 

1. Is it worth doing if I only have a standard switch? or is there a method that works well without a managed switch?

2. Setup instructions for unraid v5 (which i believe supports it, just requires customization - or am i wrong?)

3. recommend a switch that supports it if #1 answer is "don't bother without a good switch"?

 

Thanks,

With all modes of NIC bonding, you ONLY see any benefit in performance when multiple clients are talking to the server at the same time.  Each workstation is still limited to 1Gb/sec.

 

The exception is round-robin mode, which CAN give you more than 1Gb/sec to a single workstation.

 

I can do about 1.4 Gb/sec from a Linux workstation to unRAID with RR bonding.  I have not gotten RR teaming to work on a Windows workstation however.  AFAICT, only Intel NICs support RR mode under Windows, but I was unable to break 1Gb/sec with them in RR teaming mode.

 

I have an HP Procurve 1810G-24 which is fairly inexpensive, and works fine.

Even if both the UNRaid box and the Windows box have dual-teamed-nic's?

That sounds strange... I would have though I could get close to 2x the performance by doubling the NICs in both

 

(ignoring the obvious hard drive limits at that point...but assuming RAM to RAM).

Even if both the UNRaid box and the Windows box have dual-teamed-nic's?

 

You seem to be unaware that there are many different ways of "teaming" multiple NICs called bonding "modes."  Only one mode ("balance-rr" or "mode 0") is capable of providing the entire aggregate bandwidth to one destination.  The other modes only provide failover/redundancy or allow aggregate throughput to multiple destinations to approach the aggregate capacity of the bonded NICs.

 

Possible values are:

    balance-rr or 0 
        Round-robin policy: Transmit packets in sequential order from the first available slave through the last. This mode provides load balancing and fault tolerance, and is the only mode that allows a single destination to use the entire aggregate bandwidth.

    active-backup or 1 
        Active-backup policy: Only one slave in the bond is active. A different slave becomes active if, and only if, the active slave fails. The bond's MAC address is externally visible on only one port (network adapter) to avoid confusing the switch.

    balance-xor or 2 
        XOR policy: Transmit based on the selected transmit hash policy.   This mode provides load balancing and fault tolerance.

    broadcast or 3
        Broadcast policy: transmits everything on all slave interfaces. This mode provides fault tolerance.

    802.3ad or 4
        IEEE 802.3ad Dynamic link aggregation. Creates aggregation groups that share the same speed and duplex settings. Utilizes all slaves in the active aggregator according to the 802.3ad specification.  Most switches will require some type of configuration to enable 802.3ad mode.  This is the mode most NICs support when they say they support "bonding" or "teaming."

    balance-tlb or 5
        Adaptive transmit load balancing: channel bonding that does not require any special switch support. The outgoing traffic is distributed according to the current load (computed relative to the speed) on each slave. Incoming traffic is received by the current slave. If the receiving slave fails, another slave takes over the MAC address of the failed receiving slave.

    balance-alb or 6 
        Adaptive load balancing: includes balance-tlb plus receive load balancing (rlb) for IPV4 traffic, and does not require any special switch support. The receive load balancing is achieved by ARP negotiation.

Thanks for the bubbaQ...

 

And I believe that "balance-rr" or "mode 0" requires a switch that can handle it, correct?

 

Can unRaid be set to mode 0?

And I believe that "balance-rr" or "mode 0" requires a switch that can handle it, correct?

Not specifically.  It may overtax a low-end switch, but there is no reason any decent switch can't do it, other than multiple ports will see the same IP.

 

The modes supported are dependent on the NIC, not the OS and not unRAID.  I have mode 0 bonding on both my unRAID boxes.