Oddball networking question...

[Mike Davis]

The cisco switches support trunking (which is what you're looking for), 
but I'm not sure if this ability is limited to only connections between 
cisco products (the only way that I've done it). I would think that for 
a small cluster, you wouldn't need to trunk the GigE, but your app may 
be so disk intensive that it could be necessary.

My channel bonded clusters all use two switches rather than  a virtual 
switch. But, I'm in the process of replacing the networking of these 
older clusters with GigE. My new clusters were purchased with GigE. 
Channel bonding even FastE offers good performance increases (up to 
190Mb/sec) in netperf. The problems that I've had are occasional race 
conditions leading to inetd dying and nodes locking up on occasion.

Good luck,

Mike

Cris Rhea wrote:

>Currently, my small RedHat-based cluster is connected via 100Mb Ethernet 
>(small Cisco switch).
>
>I'm adding another node to act as a dedicated NFS server and would like to get
>as much bandwidth as possible between that system and the switch.  
>
>At this time, I'm not is a position to upgrade everything to GigE, but would 
>like to use a pair of GigE ports between the NFS server and the switch. 
>
>The Cisco switch is a 24 port 10/100 switch, but copper GigE cards are available 
>for the "option slots".
>
>From the reading I've done, Linux suports channel bonding; but all nodes would 
>require multiple Ethernet cards and also be running the bonding drivers. 
>
>I'm looking only to bond two GigE links between my NFS server and the switch.
>Is this possible? If so, what's it called under Linux so I can read up on it?
>
>TIA-
>
>--- Cris
>
>
>
>
>----
>  Cristopher J. Rhea                      Mayo Foundation
>  Research Computing Facility              Pavilion 2-25
>  crhea at Mayo.EDU                        Rochester, MN 55905
>  Fax: (507) 266-4486                     (507) 284-0587
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