LACP Load Balancing NOT working

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jamoses

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Sep 22, 2011
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I'm having a problem with LOAD BALANCING with two streams from different hosts. Here are the details:

I'm running FreeNAS 8.0.1-RC2-amd64 on an Intel i7 MB with 5 x 3TB drives w a large ZFS share defined and 16GB RAM. The share contains some DVD .iso images for test.
I have an onboard 1Gbps NIC (re0) at 192.168.1.15 (for the management interface)
I have a spare onboard NIC (em0) unconfigured.
I have 2 PCI dual NICS (em1, em2, em3, em4) configured as lagg0 using LACP at 192.168.1.16.

I have a 3COM 4924 1Gbps 24 port managed switch with LACP defined on ports 1,2,3,4. Four good cables are connected between switch ports 1-4 to FreeNAS ethernet PCI cards on em1-em4.

When two peer machines are pinging 192.168.1.16 continuously, everything works great. Ping responses come back fine. I can see the ping traffic on the 3COM switch LED going over port 1 which is LAGG priority 0. (as expected) If I pull the cable on port1, I can see a brief pause and the traffic moves to port2. Pulling port2, the traffic moves to port3. Just like it should. Reconnecting all cables and ping traffic moves back to port1 (as it should since it is the priority port). Perfectly. THIS SUCESSFULLY TESTS LAGG LACP FAILOVER! Yay!

Now, if I start to copy a DVD image (big file) FROM the FreeNAS share to PC#1 (with Win7). the data rate is 53MBps (424Mbps). If I simultaneously take a second PC#2 and copy the DVD .iso image to the PC, the data rate of PC#1 drops in half to about 25MBps and PC#2 is at 25MBps. Looking at the 3COM switch, ALL traffic occurs only over one of the ports. I can pull a wire, and ALL the traffic will move to port2, but I am NOT seeing any load balancing. Boo!

Load balancing isnt working. Dunno why. I'm trying to locate another switch brand/model to try out and will upgrade to FreeNAS 8.0.2 in the AM. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

-Jim
 

jamoses

Cadet
Joined
Sep 22, 2011
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ZERO Replies! SAD-FACE; DISLIKE;

..So I upgraded to 8.0.2-RELEASE x64. No change. Multiple streams still occuring over only one of the ether ports. Anyone, anyone?
 

sunflashx

Dabbler
Joined
Sep 13, 2011
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26
My experience is pretty similar. I was doing the same with a Foundry Networks (Brocade) SuperX switch configured for LACP.

Fail over worked, but I never saw any traffic over the other port otherwise.

FreeNAS 8.02 x64
SuperMicro X9SCM-F Using on board Intel NICs
 

jgreco

Resident Grinch
Joined
May 29, 2011
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Considering that that's a completely valid operational mode for link aggregation, it seems to me like the very first thing you'd want to do would be to see if FreeBSD was configured for that mode, and report ifconfig's reported configuration of the lagg.
 
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