Does FreeNAS link aggregation work with an unmanaged switch?

Question

We currently are running a FreeNAS server in our repair shop, we are hoping to upgrade the NIC to a 4-Port Gigabit card. The idea would be to bond/link together the 4 ports for higher throughput and load balancing to and from clients.

We currently only have an unmanaged Netgear GS116 switch for our LAN, and from what I can tell on Netgear's support website there is no way to configure link aggregation.

FreeNAS has the configuration to bond/link multiple NICs, however even if I do this will it work on the non-configured switch?

To put a finer point on @ewwhite's comment, link aggregation requires cooperation from both sides, so you'll need a managed switch to do this. — EEAA, Mar 26 '17 at 20:43
And "higher throughput and load balancing" to what? Client computers? — ewwhite, Mar 26 '17 at 20:45
Client computers, yes. A lot of data backups from various different clients — Norr, Mar 26 '17 at 20:47
So I'll ask the obvious question: Are the links currently being saturated? — joeqwerty, Mar 27 '17 at 00:49
In the current setup it varies device to device, not all devices fill the 1000 connection — Norr, Mar 27 '17 at 01:00

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 27 '17 at 01:55

3

Save for a few very specific exceptions, a switch that supports LACP will have a management interface (at the very least a mostly garbage command line). You need to be able to define what ports are bonded, create static bonds instead of negotiating ones, as well as a slew of other settings.

If you're not saturating your link, LACP can provide failover capabilities so it's still worth it if you want to keep whatever's connected to it up more of the time. Keep in mind that LACP doesn't increase the performance of single node-to-node connections; an example being an iSCSI LUN from iSCSI target to a client initiator. This is the same for CIFS and NFS traffic.

So if you're looking to increase the speed of your backups on a single node, this solution won't help you. It will make your connection more fault tolerant. It WILL balance traffic from multiple clients to a server.

answered Mar 27 '17 at 01:55

Spooler

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So it will only show benefits with for example multiple client transfers occuring at once? – Norr Mar 27 '17 at 02:16
Yeah. So bonding on the NAS itself is pretty reasonable to do. Not usually the case for most clients unless they provide their own servers for other things. – Spooler Mar 27 '17 at 02:18
1

Thank you for your help. I'm going look into purchasing a managed switch. Any real concerns with having LAG support but not LACP? – Norr Mar 27 '17 at 02:44
LACP is an auto-negotiating protocol, capable of defining a LAG on the switch side if one has been defined on the server side. In this, you don't have to set up your bonds statically on the switch beyond allowing those ports to automatically form bond interfaces. This way, you can just specify a bond on the server when setting up your networking there, and as long as both sides support LACP (the server already does), then you'll have yourself an auto-negotiated bond. Also, things other than LAG / LACP are usually garbage at balancing traffic. – Spooler Mar 27 '17 at 02:56
That makes a lot more sense, again thank you so much – Norr Mar 27 '17 at 03:03

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 26 '17 at 21:52

Any solution that insists you can bond interfaces without needing bonding / LACP support on the switch is usually garbage, and is sacrificing something to accommodate the multiple interfaces. Managed switches that support LACP can be purchased used fairly cheap.

Does FreeNAS link aggregation work with an unmanaged switch?

2 Answers2