Link aggy - Worth It?

[SoggyF]

Hey guys,

So the dual nic went out on my server board. So my coz brought me a few replacement options. He's a firmware engineer for that other chip company not named AMD. So he brought me an Intel I210T1G1p20 which is a PCI-E server adapter, an intel expi9301ctblk, and the dual adapter is the EXPI9402PT.

Hardware:
Mobo: Engineering sample no model # Dual socket Sandy Bridge Xeons (Intel S2400SC2 - I'm guessing)
Processor: Single Xeon Intel Confidential - 8 cores 16 threads (Xeon E5-2400 - Guessing also. CPUZ - had missing fields so couldn't ID that way.)

HDD (10 x 3TB Western Digital Enterprise)
Memory 64GB (8 x 16GB Samsung ECC - Only 4 modules register since running just single CPU. Cant think of a better place to stash the spares)
Modem: ARRIS SB6900-AC (modem/router)
FREENAS 11.1-U5


I only have a 150MB dn /5MB up connection. My question would link aggregation be worth it and install the dual port card? Or would process or learning link agg not yield a great enough advantage to justify the headache of configuring link agg and just install one of the single port nics? I was a business major not an IT guy. All this is a hobby.

 

[Chris Moore]

Link aggy - Worth It?

No

 

[SoggyF]

No

Simple enough, THANKS!

 

[DrKK]

Link aggregation is something everyone thinks would be super/swell.

But the truth is, it doesn't do (even remotely) what most people think it does, it is a huge hassle, and your return on investment of time, money, and emotion, is extremely poor for 98% of users.

 

[Chris Moore]

Link aggregation is something everyone thinks would be super/swell.

But the truth is, it doesn't do (even remotely) what most people think it does, it is a huge hassle, and your return on investment of time, money, and emotion, is extremely poor for 98% of users.

yeah, what he said.


Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

 

[SoggyF]

Link aggregation is something everyone thinks would be super/swell.

But the truth is, it doesn't do (even remotely) what most people think it does, it is a huge hassle, and your return on investment of time, money, and emotion, is extremely poor for 98% of users.

Thanks for elaborating. Thats the hint I was getting from some of the reading I was skimming through but just wanted to make sure. For the 2%, what would be ideal conditions for link agg to be of worth?

 

[Chris Moore]

For the 2%, what would be ideal conditions for link agg to be of worth?

It gives you more bandwidth to the server, but not greater speed. If you had many users, it could allow each user to have unfettered access because there are more 'lanes on the highway' but the speed limit is not changed.

 

[DrKK]

Thanks for elaborating. Thats the hint I was getting from some of the reading I was skimming through but just wanted to make sure. For the 2%, what would be ideal conditions for link agg to be of worth?

Well that's not so easy to answer. Almost never, however, is "some hobbyist dude at home serving himself files" going to actually benefit from it. You really have to have very specific (expensive) hardware throughout your fabric (which most people do not) that properly support LACP, and you mostly see the benefit when there are tons of concurrent connections each needing their own modest bandwidth.

I'm not the expert on it. In the old days we used to field a whole ton of questions from dudes who thought they could link-aggregate their two NIC ports on their Supermicro motherboard and magically double their bandwidth. Only to discover, no, it didn't work that way.

But one thing you CAN do with a multiple NIC board, is configure a LAGG for failover. i.e., if one link fails, it automatically goes to the other seamlessly. That works.

 

[SoggyF]

Yea just my desktop and 3 other laptops (which are wifi) and a couple tablets are the main clients. From what you guys are saying sounds like the effort isn't worth it but I'll look into LAGG failover configuration.

Thanks everyone for all your input.

 

[DrKK]

You may be interested in this post I made a few years ago. Still wholly correct.

https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...failover-on-your-x10-or-similar-server.39366/