RickH
Explorer
- Joined
- Oct 31, 2014
- Messages
- 61
I run several FreeNAS servers in a production environment for a mid-size scanning and document management company. We use these servers for both VMware ISCSI datastores and production storage over CIFS. All told we have more than 120 TB of storage spread over 5 FreeNAS servers. I've been extremely happy with the performance and flexibility that FreeNAS has offered us, and despite many of my vendors trying to sell me a new platform, plan on continuing to use FreeNAS for a long time to come!
We're in the process of upgrading our network backbone to 10GbE and I'm trying to figure out the best way to set everything up. In the past I've always added a 4 port 1GbE intel NIC to the onboard ports and created a single LACP link aggregation and split the cable runs to a split lacp link aggregation on at least 2 of my stacked Dell PowerConnect switches. This approach has provided excellent performance and redundancy as it survives a cabling or single switch failure with no issues - the load is simply balanced across the remaining active connections.
Due to some cost constraints, I have only a single 10GbE switch at this point (that unfortunately doesn't support stacking or spreading ling aggregation channels across multiple switches even if I get a 2nd). My newest FreeNAS server has a dual port Chelsio 10GbE NIC as well as a 2 on-board 1GbE ports. What I would like to accomplish is 2 have traffic balanced across the 2 10GbE connections with failover to the 1GbE ports if the 10GbE switch somehow goes down.
I tried setting up a single static Load Balanced aggregation with all 4 ports active and the LAGG priority number set to 1 on the 10GbE ports and 10 on the 1GbE ports - this gave me the stability I was looking for; the connection remained steady through individual cable pulls and when powering down a single switch - but performance was all over the board. The iscsi connections to my VMware hosts seems to randomly switch between the 10GbE and 1GbE connections and running 'systat -ifstat' showed that even though both 10GbE connections were up, the actual amount of data being transferred was almost even across all 4 connections.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to best set this up? Is there a way to set up a 10GbE LCAP LAGG a second 1GbE LCAP LAGG and then somehow put those into a failover group?
I appreciate any feedback!
We're in the process of upgrading our network backbone to 10GbE and I'm trying to figure out the best way to set everything up. In the past I've always added a 4 port 1GbE intel NIC to the onboard ports and created a single LACP link aggregation and split the cable runs to a split lacp link aggregation on at least 2 of my stacked Dell PowerConnect switches. This approach has provided excellent performance and redundancy as it survives a cabling or single switch failure with no issues - the load is simply balanced across the remaining active connections.
Due to some cost constraints, I have only a single 10GbE switch at this point (that unfortunately doesn't support stacking or spreading ling aggregation channels across multiple switches even if I get a 2nd). My newest FreeNAS server has a dual port Chelsio 10GbE NIC as well as a 2 on-board 1GbE ports. What I would like to accomplish is 2 have traffic balanced across the 2 10GbE connections with failover to the 1GbE ports if the 10GbE switch somehow goes down.
I tried setting up a single static Load Balanced aggregation with all 4 ports active and the LAGG priority number set to 1 on the 10GbE ports and 10 on the 1GbE ports - this gave me the stability I was looking for; the connection remained steady through individual cable pulls and when powering down a single switch - but performance was all over the board. The iscsi connections to my VMware hosts seems to randomly switch between the 10GbE and 1GbE connections and running 'systat -ifstat' showed that even though both 10GbE connections were up, the actual amount of data being transferred was almost even across all 4 connections.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to best set this up? Is there a way to set up a 10GbE LCAP LAGG a second 1GbE LCAP LAGG and then somehow put those into a failover group?
I appreciate any feedback!