2

simple Question: how can i utilize two or more ethernet interfaces on target and initiator to

  1. have fail-over
  2. to use bandwith of all interfaces

Answers? My Setup: both systems run linux and have each multiple NICs connected to the same swtich. The initiator uses one target.

Thanx in advance

Michael

3 Answers 3

3

Generally you do not get the combined capacity of multiple bonded interface when you are talking to a single host like what may happen if you are connecting to a single target on iscsi.

Bonding of course is exactly what you want to handle failover.

What you may need to look at configuring, if you iscsi target supports it, is to setup MPIO in addition to the bonding.

1
  • 2
    Some switches allow "round-robin" load balancing over bonded connections, although obviously you have to give up failover due to switch failure in that case.
    – LapTop006
    Oct 28, 2009 at 11:46
3

In general, the better approach would be to use dm-multipath - native multipath driver that is available in the more recent distributions of Linux. It is designed specifically to provide failover and load balancing of iSCSI traffic.

Here's the manual for RHEL 5.

-1

Bonding is easy, if you have a supporting switch. For LA you want to sue mode-4 and miimon of about 150.

http://linux-ip.net/html/ether-bonding.html

1
  • Bonding is more or less easy, yes. But in combination with iSCSI there are additional challenges wrt. bonding settings and iSCSI layout which require a good understanding of what's going on under the hood. And even then it's not trivial to get the expected performance out of it. Oct 6, 2017 at 21:02

You must log in to answer this question.