Re: ReadyNas + link aggregation?

weirdbeardmt · ‎2018-10-25

Hi

This is a small business situation. Currently 10 clients, a few servers and other wired components (and mixture of other devices.)

Mixture of Draytek kit for WAN and wireless. Netgear JGS516 16 port unmanaged switch for wired clients.

Have just added a ReadyNAS 3138 with approx 10tb total available disk in RAID5. This will be used for various things, such as backups, central storage and possibly streaming music to e.g., Sonos. Some of the stuff to be written to the NAS is fairly chunky (e.g. virtual machine backups... 10s of GB etc., Time Machine for the OSX clients, general purpose storage of installation media... e.g., 5gb ISOs etc.)

It's currently attached with a single ethernet cable and all looks OK but I'm looking at options for best performance.

Stupid questions...

1) The ReadyNAS has 4 lan ports... what happens if I attach more than one cable in to the switch? How does it manage concurrent connections?

2) I had planned on link aggregating on the switch... until I realised it was unmanaged and not possible. Would there be any benefit in replacing the switch with a smart one and configuring link aggregation?

Any advice around optimal setup would be much appreciated.

StephenB · ‎2018-10-25

Personally I'd upgrade the switch and use LACP.

@weirdbeardmt wrote:

1) Bond 2 (or more) interfaces in the ReadyNAS, put these in to my current switch and use either Round-Robin or Adaptive Load Balancing and this should provide some tolerance / performance without requiring anything new

Round-robin should only be used if you can configure a static LAG on the switch. There are some switches that support static LAGs, but don't support LACP.

The two modes that don't require special switch support are ALB and TLB. Sometimes these modes will misbehave, so be on the look out for that.

View solution in original post

schumaku · ‎2018-10-25

@weirdbeardmt wrote:

1) The ReadyNAS has 4 lan ports... what happens if I attach more than one cable in to the switch? How does it manage concurrent connections?

2) I had planned on link aggregating on the switch... until I realised it was unmanaged and not possible. Would there be any benefit in replacing the switch with a smart one and configuring link aggregation?

All together: If configuring a Teaming Mode allowing to work with generic switches (not all do - some require managed switches with either static trunk/LAG configs or 802.3ad LACP trunk/LAG) some advantage can be taken already with the unmanaged generic switch. Think for example about Transmit Load Balancing or slightly better the Adaptive Load Balancing.

Of course you could replace the switch by something Smart or Fully Managed, this would allow the configuration of 802.3ad LACP trunks - undoubted the industry standard today.

Borrowed from a competitor (QNAP QTS) an overview of which trunking modes are requiring what kind of switches and switch configurations:

FMI: http://docs.qnap.com/nas/4.3/cat2/en/index.html?network.htm

weirdbeardmt · ‎2018-10-25

Thanks for that. I found the equivalent Netgear version: https://kb.netgear.com/23076/What-are-bonded-adapters-and-how-do-they-work-with-my-ReadyNAS-OS-6-sto...

If I've understood correctly, then I could, either:

1) Bond 2 (or more) interfaces in the ReadyNAS, put these in to my current switch and use either Round-Robin or Adaptive Load Balancing and this should provide some tolerance / performance without requiring anything new

2) As above, but invest in a better switch to use the e.g., IEEE LACP version

With that being the case, I'm inclined to go for (1) and stay with what we've got for now.

So next question... how do I choose between RR and ALB?

StephenB · ‎2018-10-25

Personally I'd upgrade the switch and use LACP.

@weirdbeardmt wrote:

1) Bond 2 (or more) interfaces in the ReadyNAS, put these in to my current switch and use either Round-Robin or Adaptive Load Balancing and this should provide some tolerance / performance without requiring anything new

Round-robin should only be used if you can configure a static LAG on the switch. There are some switches that support static LAGs, but don't support LACP.

The two modes that don't require special switch support are ALB and TLB. Sometimes these modes will misbehave, so be on the look out for that.

schumaku · ‎2018-10-25

@StephenB - on the point!

weirdbeardmt · ‎2018-11-06

FWIW, I posted a new topic on options for adding new switches. Your thoughts would be appreciated.