switch assisted load balancing on a dual port NIC

[thraxes]

I have a Compaq 3122dual 10/100 NIC and to put it bluntly this card rocks. I have had it now for 3 years and have used the teaming quite a few times, but until now only in transmit load balancing mode. That means the incoming packets are received only on the primary port, transmission is done over both ports, effectively putting my download speed at 100MBits and my upload at 200 MBits.

Now I want to find out about Switch assisted mode. I guess that the switch has to be a managed switch which has to be able to support this (the 20$ WLinx pocket switch does fine in Trans.Ld.Bal. though). Is that correct? Does anybody know if newer build 3COM SuperStack switches can do this? I am asking as I will be getting such a switch in a few weeks for the weekend and if possible drive my NIC to the max for the first time ever - I guess it's a geek thing.

 

[onelin]

A quick search showed that at least some do. Looks like it depends on the switch. It should be managed and support port-trunking for it to do what you want it to. I've seen it done, have fun with it!

 

[thraxes]

Oh good...I deffinately know that the switch can do trunking... this should be interesting

 

[Garion]

In the switch world, trunking refers to the ability of a switch to connect to another switch and use a common set of VLANS. Ever switch maker calls the port aggregation something different, but Cisco calls it "EtherChannel".

- G

 

[wlee]

I think some vendors call it "port binding/aggregation " or something like that. Cisco calls it "Fast Ether-Channel " I have a Dell 50 Port switch that supports it, but I haven't tried it. Better off to just go Gigabit, unless you also need the fail-over that FEC provides.

 

[thraxes]

At the moment I don't have GBit, and if I were to get GBit, it would have to be fibre based. The places where I could really use GBit don't have GBit via copper because of Mag. interference in their setups. So it is a bit expensive. At home I certainly could use copper GBit when doing video editing on two machines, but a Firewire link between the 2 PCs is good enough for now.

The dual port card I got from a reseller that went bankrupt 3 years ago. A colleague filled the trunk of his car with these cards and sold them off at 80$ a piece. I have it installed in my main RIg, and use the load balancing mostly at network parties . Occasionally I use it for other more serious stuff, like my project in a few weeks, for which I am renting a "real" switch. As I said, this is just for kicks, but a dual GBit Adapter would be mindboggling... if you have PCI64, a fast RAID setup etc... to actually use it.

That's another reason why I am reluctant to go GBit, my drive system is in no way going to effectively use it and so dual 100MBits is a pretty good match to my drives perfomance in most cases.

Thanks for the answers though!

 

[bgroff]

Originally posted by: Garion
In the switch world, trunking refers to the ability of a switch to connect to another switch and use a common set of VLANS. Ever switch maker calls the port aggregation something different, but Cisco calls it "EtherChannel".

- G

In the Cisco world trunking refers to the ability of a switch to connect to another switch and use a common set of VLANS. The rest of the switch world refers to this as tagging. To add to the confusion, the rest of the switch world defines trunking as the aggregation of more than one switchport into a common channel of bandwidth (aka link aggregation via 802.3ad).

 

[Kadarin]

Originally posted by: bgroff

Originally posted by: Garion
In the switch world, trunking refers to the ability of a switch to connect to another switch and use a common set of VLANS. Ever switch maker calls the port aggregation something different, but Cisco calls it "EtherChannel".

- G

In the Cisco world trunking refers to the ability of a switch to connect to another switch and use a common set of VLANS. The rest of the switch world refers to this as tagging. To add to the confusion, the rest of the switch world defines trunking as the aggregation of more than one switchport into a common channel of bandwidth (aka link aggregation via 802.3ad).

Foundry, for example, calls the feature "trunking", and offers two configuration modes: "trunk switch", where the trunk is configured to hash the traffic based on the destination MAC, and "trunk server", where the loadbalancing hash is based on source MAC. 802.3ad is a standards-based dynamic link-aggregation.