[Linux-cluster] bonding question?

[Matt Brookover]

The short answer is yes, bonded pairs offer both performance improvement
and availability.  I tend to doubt that most servers with any real
application could process all of the traffic from 2 1gb ethernet ports.

The network guys here set up 3 Cisco 3750 switches with the high speed
link that ties them together into one large switch.  On redhat
enterprise 3, I set up 2 bonded ethernets, each plugged into different
switches.  I have noticed that the inbound traffic goes to the first
ethernet, but outbound traffic is round-robin.  As I understand it, the
Cisco switches do not do round-robin because there is no efficient way
to keep track of which port received the last packet.  It is faster to
send all packets for a bonded ethnet pair to one port.  I can pull
either ethernet port and the other will take over the traffic.

As I understand it, any of the 3 switches can fail and every thing will
stay up. 

Sorry, I have never used a NetApp with ISCSI.

Matt

On Sun, 2005-12-18 at 04:20, Omer Faruk Sen wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Is bonding can be used only for performance improvements or can it be also
> used for path availability along with redundant switch (2 switches)
> configuration for iSCSI ?
> 
> Also in a paper of netapp (http://www.netapp.com/library/tr/3192.pdf)
> iSCSI configuration is shown as 2 connection for one switch (in NAS ISLAND
> Linux Cluster) but in SAN ISLAND (fiber connection and switches) 1
> connection is being made for one switch which provides path availability.
> What I want to ask is how path availability without SPOF can be provided
> with iSCSI solutions? Can I achive it with 2 ethernet card that works with
> bonding and each of them is connected to one switch (2 switches is
> configured in cluster)? I think for that I have to use multipath
> (http://christophe.varoqui.free.fr/wiki/wakka.php?wiki=Home) software for
> that. Am I right?
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