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| Thread ID: 72578 | 2006-09-18 03:36:00 | Fileserver Load Sharing | Erayd (23) | Press F1 |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 485396 | 2006-09-18 03:36:00 | Having just upgraded my fileserver, I am now in the position of having a filesystem that is over twice the speed of my network (100MBits/sec ethernet). Because of this, I have put two network cards in the server in an attempt to fully utilise the disk bandwidth the server is capable of, but am not sure how to go about sharing the load between the two cards. At present, I have both cards with different IPs in the same subnet, and use DNS to spread connections across the two cards. This 'sort of' works, but in the following situation (which occurs quite a lot) it doesn't have much effect: PC1 connects (DNS resolves server as 192.168.4.3), starts huge file download PC2 connects (DNS resolves server as 192.168.4.4), downloads something really tiny PC3 connects (DNS resolves server as 192.168.4.3), starts huge file download This results in both PC1 and PC3 trying to download huge files through the same network interface (192.168.4.3). What I would like to do is be able to share the same connection across both cards (i.e. load-share the individual packets), as that should prevent this problem occuring and ensure that the full capacity of the server can be utilised. How should I go about achieving this? Is it even possible? Cheers, Bletch |
Erayd (23) | ||
| 485397 | 2006-09-18 03:44:00 | Hi bud, Are the NIC's teamed. Do you have a intellent switch?. Not all switches support NIC teaming! What make are the NIC's. Intel drivers support teaming natively now, not sure about others. |
SolMiester (139) | ||
| 485398 | 2006-09-18 03:51:00 | Can you explain a bit more what you mean by teaming? I've never tried to load-share between cards before, so I'm a little out of my depth. The switches are just generic 8-port XNet ones. The cards are different - one is a built-in one (I believe intel, but not a recent one), the other one is just a cheap DSE one (realtek). The fileserver OS is Debian Etch. Now that you've let me know what the correct term is (teaming) I've managed to find a howto (www.howtoforge.com) - I'll see how I get on and then post back here with the results. |
Erayd (23) | ||
| 485399 | 2006-09-18 04:01:00 | Oh, dont if I can help you then. I have 2 NIC on a couple of my servers. Win2003, with the intel drivers for both nic's you can then make a 3rd virtual nic which will use one of the 2 ip addresses, and think will load balance and give fault tolerance. Dont think it works with different nics. It sounds like you are just using 2 nic separately, which means the server has 2 ip addresses, I suppose you can call it fault tolerance to a point, however a I/O request will only use 1 of the card and not provide bandwidth of 2. |
SolMiester (139) | ||
| 485400 | 2006-09-18 04:09:00 | It sounds like you are just using 2 nic separately, which means the server has 2 ip addresses.Yes, this is what I'm doing at the moment but I'd like to change it to proper teaming if possible. The howto seems to say more or less the same thing you just did - the OS sees only one network device, and a packet scheduler figures out which card gets used for which packets. I think it may work, but as you say the cards being different may scupper the whole thing. | Erayd (23) | ||
| 485401 | 2006-09-18 04:20:00 | Hey Bud, Yeah, not sure about diff nic's, and wouldnt have a clue about other o/s. However, it does appear to be a software development, hence the like cards and drivers. I did have it running for awhile on the main server, was experiencing heavy network lag!, but stopped it as was advised i needed an intelligent switch to aknowledge the virtual nic as 2, or something like that. Not sure on this bit though. check this www.dell.com edit for update. apparently intel ans software allows use of 3rd party adapters also. |
SolMiester (139) | ||
| 485402 | 2006-09-18 04:33:00 | Yeehah! It goes! I used this howto (www.5dollarwhitebox.org), and everything went completely smoothly without a hitch - and no network lag seems to be apparent. Packets are shared between both cards, and thus far I haven't seen a single problem. Now I just need to test the throughput rate :D One thing I did notice is that the server can't receive a DHCP lease with the teamed interface - it needed to be statically set. Thanks very much SolMiester - you've been a great help. |
Erayd (23) | ||
| 485403 | 2006-09-18 04:43:00 | Excellent, let me know how you get on with throughput! You dont have dhcp leases on your servers do you? |
SolMiester (139) | ||
| 485404 | 2006-09-18 04:53:00 | You dont have dhcp leases on your servers do you?Normally the servers have their IP set via DHCP, but the addresses are reserved - i.e. 'Server A' will always get given the same IP. Unfortunately this doesn't seem to work with the teamed interfaces, but never mind - it doesn't make much difference really. | Erayd (23) | ||
| 485405 | 2006-09-18 04:59:00 | Wow Bletch, ALL my servers are static, never came accross dhcp servers before, suppose if they are reserved its okay. Do you ever get dns or reverse dns errors? | SolMiester (139) | ||
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