[Beowulf] Re: [Bonding-devel] 802.3ad: Should it behave in this way??

[Jason R. Martin]

You should be able to change the load balancing algorithm, on Cisco
IOS-based switches you can view the current load balancing algorithm
with "show etherchannel load-balance" and change it with "port-channel
load-balance <mode>".  I believe the setting is switch-wide, not
interface specific, at least on my Cisco 4948.

Jason

On Apr 8, 2005 7:20 AM, Andrei Maslennikov <Andrei.Maslennikov at caspur.it> wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> we are trying to set up a link aggregation on our server with two GigE
> NICs Intel e1000 bonded together either with the bonding driver which
> comes with the RHEL3 (kernel 2.4.21-27.0.2smp), or with the Intel IANS
> teaming solution. This figure represents our layout:
> 
>           Client-1   Client-2   Client-3   Client-4
>              |         |          |          |
>              |e1000    |e1000     |e1000     |e1000
>          +-------------------------------------------+
>          |       CISCO CATALYST 3570, 802.3ad        |
>          |               - OR -                      |
>          |            DELL 5324, 802.3ad             |
>          +-------------------------------------------+
>                     e1000-A |   | e1000-B
>                             |   |
>                             |   |
>                       SERVER (Xeon 2x3.4GHz)
> 
> We would like to make sure that when all 4 clients talk to the
> server, both e1000-A and e1000-B NICs operate at full speed and
> are evenly serving 2 clients each at a time.
> 
> To test this configuration, we have used 4 ttcp streams in 2 ways:
> 
>   - four senders started on server, four clients receiving
>   - four senders started on four clients, server receiving
> 
> In the first case (packets go *out* of the server), everything
> works as one would expect. All the streams end up at the
> same time, and the aggregate throughput of all streams is
> in excess of 200 MBytes/sec.
> 
> In the second case, one stream is ending up long before the
> three others, with the speed of 100+ MBytes/sec. And other
> 3 end all at the same time, again with the aggregate speed of
> 100+ Mbytes/sec.
> 
> I.e. instead of observing 2 streams over e1000-A and 2 other
> streams over e1000-B we see 1 stream over e1000-A and 3 others
> over e1000-B.
> 
> As the result does not depend on the type of switch in use
> (CISCO or DELL), we assume that 802.3ad (which was originally
> designed for switch trunking interconnects) simply may not
> be a good solution for our case.
> 
> We know that there are other intelligent switches around (starting
> with CISCO 6500 series) which may have a better balancing, but they
> are a lot more expensive. Or one could use some kind of a
> stand-alone balancer...
> 
> Are there any other people on the list who tried to configure
> a similar layout with 802.3ad, and succeded?
> 
> Thanks ahead for any comment - Andrei, Marco, Miguel.
> 
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