Link Aggregation - port count question

[FlashEngineer]

Not sure if this is right place to post but I was wondering is there anything worth with using a LAG (Link aggregation) with 6 ports rather than the usual 2,4,8?

I read there's issue with balancing links with not a power of 2 for LACP... couldn't find anything on google though.

 

[Deslok]

6 sounds like an odd number card wise unless you're using something like this but i've never heard of any issues with LACP and powers of 2 where did you read that?

 

[FlashEngineer]

6 sounds like an odd number card wise unless you're using something like this but i've never heard of any issues with LACP and powers of 2 where did you read that?

I have an atom server running pfSense which has 4 onboard NIC + I have another 4 NIC PCIe card which gives me 8 ports. I need one for WAN and the 7 left are for LAN, which I want to use 6 for LAG.

Read it somewhere on another forum, maybe it's only due to LACP but round robin or load balance is ok? I'm actually not even sure if LACP gives more bandwidth or not.

 

[Deslok]

My experience has been that it allows you to handle multiple streams using a single IP at least with LACP, I've seen multiple Gigabit links to a storage server in my office with a 4 port wide Nic Team(4x1gb to a switch linked via 10gb fiber to a switch stack with ~80 clients) but I've never seen speeds in excess of 1gb connecting to it with a single device unless I used something like SMB Multichannel and disabled Nic Teaming

 

[FlashEngineer]

So would using LACP be the best way to maximize bandwidth between around 30-40 users?

 

[NetWise]

If you only have 1gbe WAN and Internet out, the 30-40 users can do more than 1gbe anyways. What's the benefit your looking for with the LACP? There must be another switch that the users and servers are on. If they're the same VLAN then they don't route anyway. If they aren't that switch should be doing the routing usually. If it's not how much routed inter-VLAN traffic are you expecting?

 

[FlashEngineer]

Yeah right now, my pfSense router is doing the intervlan routing, hence the 6 port LAG. I'm currently deciding which L3 switch to upgrade in order to use the switch to do the static routing between vlan. But unsure 100%, may just stick with L2 switch and keep pfSense in routing the vlans. Also have 5 openvpn connections for different vlans or ip to exit through the internet.

 

[FlashEngineer]

So there's no issue with 6 ports?

 

[mstone]

Can you saturate 2 ports? If no, then stop.

 

[FlashEngineer]

Yes can saturate by concurrent FTP transfers

 

[mstone]

Yes can saturate by concurrent FTP transfers

So you now have LACP working? The point of my last comment was that you were asking whether LACP would help at all, which is something that's easy to test. So if you've saturated 2 ports, add another and see if your utilization goes up. Basically, there's not much value in answering the question in the abstract because the evaluation is fairly straightforward and more valid than speculation (because the answer is dependent on a number of factors). If you have difficulty scaling up, then you can try to figure out why that is. (I.e., is it fundamental to the traffic, is it a limitation of the hardware, is it a configuration issue, etc.)