Recently for a customer of ours got two of these 10gbe switches: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OZCFUDG, one for their server rack (24 port)(with the unRAID server) and one for their patch panel (48 port). The fiber / DSL rollover connections come in at the rack. We have a 10gb link between the two switches. The unRAID server we put in has dual 10gbe. I would like to have one connected to the patch switch and one connected to the server rack switch. I am trying to limit the backup / file data from bogging down the network over the link between the two switches. What is the best network setup (bonding mode) in this situation? They used to have 2 10/100 switches on the patch panel and 2 gbe in the rack. Needless to say, the network is SOOO much better now than it was already, but would still like to have it fully optimized if possible.

I highly doubt you are going to experience any 'bogged down' performance over 10GB. The problem with the way you describe connecting the unRAID server is that the server will use either connection. If you want to bond the 10GB connections on the unRAID server you need to set up two dedicated bonded ports on a switch first and then use those, but they will have to be on one switch, you can't spread them between two switches I don't believe.

 

Those aren't technically 10GB switches, they are gigabit switches with 10GB uplink ports. So are you connecting the unRAID server to the uplink ports then? I would just connect the unRAID server to two bonded gigabit ports.

There are scenarios where having a 10gbe pipe out of the server are an advantage. One of my examples is having a single vm that needs to distribute data to several other machines on the network. Setting the network bond with 4 gigabit ports never yielded greater than a total of 1gbps only using 1 port because all machines connected to the vm though the same ip address on a single port. I attempted to setup multiple virtual nic's on the vm, but that didn't work out.

 

In the end I upgraded to a single 10gbe card and now multiple machines can access the vm via that connection through a quanta LB4m, and I get 2-4gbps throughput from the vm to all of them. This throughput coincides with the amount of data input the other machines are able to "ingest."

 

 

I could be way off here, but I see 2 options. 1 is balance alb bonding. The issue may occur that traffic from one switch is moved to the other via the 10gbe uplink and then routed to the server, as the server sees there is ample room on 1 10gbe port for all of it. So then you defeat the point of having it setup that way. Also i've never used bonding on 10gbe but have no reason to think it wouldn't work. The second option is manually assigning  each port on a different subnet, and defining how different devices access it that way. Then you can guarantee the traffic is split and define how it is split across both ports, and not congest the 10gbe link between switches. 

 

Maybe there are other ways that someone more knowledgeable than me can share.

A lot will depend on how the other machines address the unRAID server and how the two switches are configured with each other. Spanning would be preferred, but I'm unsure if you need VLAN or segmented subnets.

 

No matter what way, binding may not be needed and not worth the hassle.

 

- If they use the IP address, then attach a single 10G to each switch, and point the machines to the IP address that unRAID is answering to on that switch

 

- If they are using the server's name, then make sure your DNS has entries for both the IP addresses and the end users should connect to the IP of the switch they're on based upon the faster response.

Edited March 30, 20179 yr by GeekMajic
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