Bind two 1Gbps Ethernet Ports and Run in Open vSwitch

[simon_lefisch]

Hey everyone,

I just purchased a dual-port ethernet PCI-e card and wanted to bind those 2 ports together for higher thru-put. However I'm not sure if I should bind them together then add it to Open vSwitch or I add the ports to Open vSwitch first then bind the 2 ports. I was thinking the former but wanted to see if anyone on here has done this before with Open vSwitch and what would be the best way to go about it. Any help/advice would be great.

Btw, I am running the latest CentOS 7 version and have Open vSwitch v2.9.2 and KVM installed. Thanks in advanced

[TrevorH]

What you're talking about is bonding or teaming. Your switch will need to support LACP for it to be most useful. But sadly, bonding doesn't necessarily do much for bandwidth since it's limited to running one tcp connection over one of the 2 links so unless you have more than 1 bandwidth heacy tcp connection, you will not see much improvement.

If you're after raw speed then looking at 10Gbps networking would be a much more reliable way to improve things.

[simon_lefisch]

What you're talking about is bonding or teaming. Your switch will need to support LACP for it to be most useful. But sadly, bonding doesn't necessarily do much for bandwidth since it's limited to running one tcp connection over one of the 2 links so unless you have more than 1 bandwidth heacy tcp connection, you will not see much improvement.

If you're after raw speed then looking at 10Gbps networking would be a much more reliable way to improve things.

Hi Trevor,

Thanks for the response and sorry for my late response, been a crazy week. Anyway, no worries about the throughput. However I would still like to Bond the 2 NICs together. I was thinking of using Dynamic Link Aggregation (my switch does have that option), however I'm not sure what way I should set it up. Should I add the 2 NIC ports to Open vSwitch first then bond together (if that's possible, still learning about OVS), or should I bond them first in CentOS then add the bonded ports to OVS? Not sure if you have any experience with OVS, but any input you can give would be much appreciated....as always Thanks again for all your help.