Hi. I'm a Unix Administrator, mathematics enthusiast, and amateur philosopher. This is where I rant about that which upsets me, laugh about that which amuses me, and jabber about that which holds my interest most: Unix.
Microsoft, why do you hate me?
I have a few ETL boxen that handle insane amounts of data every night. Hundreds of billions of rows of data get extracted from our OLTP databases, transformed, and then loaded into our datawarehousing machines. Needless to say, we're running into serious networking bottlenecks that are causing some ETL operations on larger databases to take 10+ hours, and each night we can watch the gigabit links on each of our ETL servers peg out at 100%. It's getting so bad that we have connections that get dropped (and so that given ETL operation would fail) and cause problems, so we decided to try some link aggregation (bonding, whatever you want to call it) to get more bandwidth to the ETL machines.
Ok. Every OS on the planet has some form of link aggregation capabilities...except for Microsoft Windows. Sadly, these machines *are* running Server 2003, so I looked into upgrading to Server 2008. Still not supported in Server 2008. Blarg. Someone please tell Microsoft that it's 2011 (link aggregation has been around for 15+ years now).
Alright, I discussed the issue with the reporting cluster administrator, and he's not comfortable with running Linux within the report cluster (which is mainly Windows based, with the exception of the actual databases, which are PostgreSQL on Linux). I mention the fact that Intel, nvidia, and HP NIC's can do link-level aggregation (as opposed to higher level "aggregation" in the kernel on sane OS's), so we look at the NIC's in the servers in question. Broad-effin'-com. Crap. Dell was kind enough to verify that the quad port intel cards they carry for their servers will indeed do link-level aggregation, and shipped me one for each server. At $500 per card, I'm sure glad we're sticking with Microsoft.
It never fails. Just when I think I can't stand dealing with Linux for another second, Microsoft goes and proves me wrong. I sure am glad I'm a Unix Admin and not a Windows Admin.
Ok. Every OS on the planet has some form of link aggregation capabilities...except for Microsoft Windows. Sadly, these machines *are* running Server 2003, so I looked into upgrading to Server 2008. Still not supported in Server 2008. Blarg. Someone please tell Microsoft that it's 2011 (link aggregation has been around for 15+ years now).
Alright, I discussed the issue with the reporting cluster administrator, and he's not comfortable with running Linux within the report cluster (which is mainly Windows based, with the exception of the actual databases, which are PostgreSQL on Linux). I mention the fact that Intel, nvidia, and HP NIC's can do link-level aggregation (as opposed to higher level "aggregation" in the kernel on sane OS's), so we look at the NIC's in the servers in question. Broad-effin'-com. Crap. Dell was kind enough to verify that the quad port intel cards they carry for their servers will indeed do link-level aggregation, and shipped me one for each server. At $500 per card, I'm sure glad we're sticking with Microsoft.
It never fails. Just when I think I can't stand dealing with Linux for another second, Microsoft goes and proves me wrong. I sure am glad I'm a Unix Admin and not a Windows Admin.
Total Comments 2
Comments
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oh yea, they can overhead anything
Posted 09-17-2011 at 03:36 AM by Web31337 
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The saga continues. Dell sent the wrong cards, so I ordered risers that would work with the cards. Dell doesn't make risers that work with PCI-X on the R410. Hrmmm.
Had them exchange the cards, but Dell doesn't make any risers that work with PCIe and R410's. Serious WTF? Hrmmm.
Grabbed an unused R610 so we could use the Intel cards, only to find out as we're nearing testing that Broadcom has released a link-aggregation driver for the built-in broadcom cards in the R410. At that point the only coherent phrase I could muster up was '#$@^*&$#!!!'
Blarg. Broadcom it is. At least now we don't have to purchase all new R610's + Intel NIC's and migrate everything over.
And to think...none of this would've happened if Microsoft supported link aggregation natively. Sigh.Posted 09-22-2011 at 11:00 AM by rocket357
