Link Aggregation with Dell PowerConnect 2716

[kamranjkhan]

I have a newly configured FreeNAS 9.11-stable box on a Supermicro X8SIE-F Server Motherboard, with dual NICs on the motherboard. currently, its connected to my dell powerconnect 2716 switch in unmanaged mode and everything works just fine. I'm able to get about 100MB/s from a single connection NIC from my desktop through the switch to FreeNAS.

I want to configure the two NICs into a lagg now and having trouble. When I go to add add a lagg network interface and select either failover or LACP (which is the mode I ultimately want to do), the web GUI gets stuck on "Please wait", and after several minutes doesn't seem to recover, and if I refresh the page I can't reach the page again.
Before attempting the lagg in FreeNAS, I changed the powerconnect 2716 from unmanaged to managed mode, let to reboot, logged into the switch, changed its IP address from the default 192.168.2.x to one on my subnet 192.168.1.x and logged in to its web console. from here, I went the the LAGG settings and selected the two ports that the FreeNAS NICs are connected to, and saved that as lagg1.

But I cant get the FreeNAS box to set up a lagg interface through the direct console or the web GUI.

Any thoughts on this? I've seen some things online that suggest that the powerconnect 2716 doesn't support LACP and can't support lagg with FreeNAS? is that right? even if that is the case, why does the web GUI freeze up and I get locked out? I've been having to use the web console to delete the configurations attempts and reset the FreeNAS machine.

Do I need to use VLANs? Any configuration I need to do on my router? its a ubiquiti ERPoe‑5, which i have configured with basic DHCP services. I have tried to assign a static IP to the FreeNAS box from the router, but that looks like it hurts more than it helps.

Any guidance would be appreciated.

 

[BigDave]

I've seen some things online that suggest that the powerconnect 2716 doesn't support LACP

According to this Dell forum post the switch does support it.

The FreeNAS 11 documentation has directions for setting up link
aggregation and link failover.

 

[BigDave]

Section 7.4 does state:
"The benefit can only be observed when multiple clients are transferring files from the NAS. The flow entering into the NAS depends on the Ethernet switch load-balance algorithm."
The above statement indicates that which is common knowledge here in
the forum, that link aggregation only benefits a high client volume
situation when it comes to transfer speeds.