bonding NIC on Xserve

[abz_mungul]

Hi

Has anyone tried bonding the NIC on their Xserve? has this proven successful
especially when pushing out builds using Casper?

Thanks

Abz

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[Kedgar]

Nic bonding works ok, however I don't think it works as advertised. Unless you have an additional NIC, once you turn it on, LOM stops working. You used to be able to run both LOM & bonding on the same interfaces, but not with the newer hardware.

Sent from my iPad

[ernstcs]

Yup, I use it, and Ken is correct on LOM.

It works pretty well though.

Craig E

[abz_mungul]

I dont think im really going to use the LOM feature on it.

What do I need to do in order to bond the NICS?

[#5]

You'll need your network guys to setup LACP in the switches.
I use Apple 2-port card in 6(!) xserves and have a total of 3GBit on all these servers. I use internal port 1 for LOM and the rest as a LACP Bond.

What you should know is that LACP bonds cannot achieve higher bandwidth computer to computer than the speed of one individual port. This is by design of the LACP protocol. So, using 3 ports, 3 machines can use 1GBit each, but 2 servers talking to eachother is still 1GBit. LACP distributes the load on the ports according to MAC adresses and in worst case, all computers will talk on the same port and still share 1GBit.

LACP makes sense only if you have lots of clients, otherwise your gain may be small, if any.

//Patrik

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17 mar 2011 kl. 13:37 skrev Abdurrahman Mungul:

[donmontalvo]

All the Xserves we have deployed for imaging and distribution points have teamed ethernet. We tested imaging 10 Macs with and without teamed ethernet, definitely made a difference in speed.

LOM isn't something we need (we have plenty of hands on site). If it were, we would get a second dual port NIC for teaming ethernet, so we can use the built in NIC for LOM.

This will all be moot once we move JSS off this stinkin' Apple hardware. ;)

Don

[John_Wetter]

We use it, on the netboot/package servers it helps a lot. We boot/image
full labs at a time, so we see quite nice performance increase. We have the
servers with another NIC in them and bond across the two, leaving one port
for LOM and management traffic, and another for backup VLAN, this also gives
fault tolerance. To put enough data out, we also have hardware RAID-5 on
the package servers to have disk capacity for filling up the NIC's and
overhead for doing other work as well.

John

[kirk_magill]

After bonding, and aggregating ports on a capable switch, what port/s did you enable on the Server Admin. I have the options of: Ethernet (Bond0)
Ethernet 1
Ethernet 2,

I have tried all three settings and cannot get my macbooks to connect to casper and pull an image.