802.3ad Performance

TruckStuff · 03-30-2010, 04:54 PM

I'm working on setting up 802.3ad bonding on our corporate file server. I've configured EtherChannel on our cisco switches and got the bonded interface up just fine. Everything is functioning normally, and perhaps thats the problem. Network performance is just the same as it was before. I'm bonding the two onboard Broadcom gigabit NICs on the server, but the bandwidth is the same as when we were running a single NIC.

The hardware is more than enough to handle more bandwidth (2x Xeon cores @2.33GHz driving a RAID5 array). I had expected to see a measurable jump in bandwidth, though not a full doubling. So I guess my question is have I done something wrong or were my expectations wrong?

Code:

$ cat /etc/modprobe.d/bonding.conf 
alias bond0 bonding
options bonding miimon=100 mode=4 lacp_rate=1

Code:

$ cat /proc/net/bonding/bond0 
Ethernet Channel Bonding Driver: v3.2.5 (March 21, 2008)

Bonding Mode: IEEE 802.3ad Dynamic link aggregation
Transmit Hash Policy: layer2 (0)
MII Status: up
MII Polling Interval (ms): 100
Up Delay (ms): 0
Down Delay (ms): 0

802.3ad info
LACP rate: fast
Active Aggregator Info:
	Aggregator ID: 2
	Number of ports: 2
	Actor Key: 17
	Partner Key: 2
	Partner Mac Address: 00:0f:8f:df:fd:00

Slave Interface: eth0
MII Status: up
Link Failure Count: 0
Permanent HW addr: 00:1c:23:ba:ac:64
Aggregator ID: 2

Slave Interface: eth1
MII Status: up
Link Failure Count: 0
Permanent HW addr: 00:1c:23:ba:ac:66
Aggregator ID: 2

acid_kewpie · 04-01-2010, 12:55 PM

it's quite possibly your expectations. How are you checking the bandwidth? If it's a single connection then you'll get no benefit at all, as depending on how it's tweaked, the NIC chosen on either side of the connection is determined on a mac or ip address hash, so one client will always use the same single nic.