1st Post - nic teaming

[MrChiZel]

Hi everybody, glad to be part of the FreeNas community. I am completely blown away by the performance I am seeing with my new Freenas running on semi-old hardware.

I have read many posts here on this subject, but thought I would ask bluntly...

Are there any plans to incorporate Nic Teaming (increased throughput) into future releases of FreeNas? Is it possible developers? Is it worth / not worth the endeavor? I see many, many people asking about it.

I would like to see my dual-port Intel nic saturated with load balancing. Link aggregation is a nice feature, but it's about users and not speed right? Sorry, not trying to offend.

MSI Big Bang X58 (ms-7666)
Xeon W3565
24GB G. Skill RipJaw (3 x 8)
4 x 4tb WD Red NAS
4 x 2tb WD Purple

 

[depasseg]

In your mind, what is the difference between Link Aggregation and NIC Teaming?

 

[MrChiZel]

I'm talking about combining nic's to theoretically expand the bandwidth (pipe). I'm speaking about bandwidth aggregation at the adapter, similar to ether channel in AIX. This is done before the switch and LACP even come into play.

 

[depasseg]

Ether Channel in AIX is Link Aggregation. In fact 802.3ad (LACP) is one of the modes that can be configured.
https://www-01.ibm.com/support/know...m.ibm.aix.networkcomm/etherchannel_config.htm

I thought you might be referring to the windows implementation to improve SMB performance over LAG's which is coming soon to samba.

 

[depasseg]

And Ether Channel requires full support in the switch, so I'm a little confused by your last sentence.

I know of nothing that allows multiple NICs on a host to somehow merge into one without some form of Link Aggregation protocol being run on both the host and switch. I would love to be wrong though.

 

[MrChiZel]

Well that may have been a bad example then.. I am indeed referring to the similarities to Windows 2012 Server and SMB you are referencing.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

[depasseg]

OK. In that case, we are all waiting on Samba to implement SMB3 Multichannel.
http://blog.obnox.de/demo-of-smb3-multi-channel-with-samba/

 

[Allison_45 Drives]

Hi, I'm part of the 45 Drives team (home of the Storinator storage pod, which works awesome with FreeNAS). Our R&D team has been experimenting with this network bonding/NIC teaming with FreeNAS and other OS. One of our R&D engineers was able to achieve 30Gb bandwidth through network bonding, and he wrote a blog post about his experience that's coming out in the next couple days.

Will share it here once it's live, if you're interested in having a read.

 

[Allison_45 Drives]

Here's our blog post about this very subject:

http://45drives.blogspot.ca/2015/07/how-to-achieve-20gb-and-30gb-bandwidth.html

Interested to hear your feedback!

 

[depasseg]

Hi Allison, while that is an interesting writeup, it only addresses the network element. The OP was specifically interested in the speed of the shares. It would be great if you could configure a CIFS share on that server and see what type of file transfer speeds you can get. After all, we build these boxes to store files, not just fling test bits back and forth.

 

[Allison_45 Drives]

Appreciate the feedback - we've gotten a couple similar comments from others who read through the post. As a result, our R&D team is also looking at doing some more bandwidth measurements wherein they movie real files across the network to and from large RAIDs. Thanks for checking out the post!