Switch port settings to a Dell teamed Nic?

[Andy White]

Hello,

We have a Dell server that is 4 of it's 1GB network ports going into a switch and I'm not sure of the best way to get the best speed.

When I create a team I bundle the 4 ports on the Dell server together, but the options I have are:

• General Trunking (FEC/GEC)/802.3ad-Draft Static
• Link Aggregation (802.3ad)
• SLB (Auto-Fallback Disbable)

Which one is best and would I create just a normal trunk on the Cisco end or let the software on the Dell do the work and have the ports as normall access ports on the Switch?

Thanks

[rais]

NIC teaming is usually for connecting a host to multiple switches. In addition, it requires two interfaces to be teamed. One stays active, one standby. So may be you can bundle two interfaces in 802.3ad and create two logical interfaces and team them.

Alternatively, you could just bundle all 4 as one big pipe and not use teaming.

[devils_advocate]

Personally I would go with 802.3ad link aggregation as this will allow all 4 ports to be bundled together to form an etherchannel giving you 4Gb of throughput and resiliency if one link were to fail. Any form of teames/bundled connection would need config on the switch as well.

Having used 'teaming' in the past, I am really not a fan and much prefer link aggregation.

Deciding whether its a trunk or an access port from a switch perspective would depend on whether you need to pass traffic from multiple Vlans to the Dell. If the server will be hosting virtual machines which need to be in different subnets then he physical link should be a trunk.

[Andy White]

The server is our backup server.  The thing is we have 2 stacks of Cisco switches so I guess I would need to put all 4 ports in one stack or 2 in each and create an etherchannel from both?

[devils_advocate]

Assuming the switches are an actual 'Stack' in that they are connected by the Stacking cables then you can plug two interfaces into one switch and two into another and create a single etherchannel which will bond all 4 links together for 4Gb of throughput

Thanks

[Andy White]

Sorry by bad explanation, we have 2 stacks of switches with 4 switches in each,  the 2 stacks are separate from each other and both connect to our core switches.  So I I guess 1 etherchannel is not possible and I will need to create 2, 1 in each stack.   Use LACP on the etherchannel and on the Dell Broadcom nic?

[devils_advocate]

Depends on what you are trying to achieve.

As you mentioned, you can't create an Etherchannel between switch stacks but you can split the physical ports between switches in the same stack and make them part of the same etherchannel.

Assuming you want 4 physical interfaces that can be bundled into a single LACP portchannel then you would make sure all physical interfaces are plugged into the same stack. How you do this is up to you, for best resiliency in a 4switch stack, you could plug a physical interface into each switch and then bundle all those ports together into 1 etherchannel.

Do you just need the server to have a single IP address?

Will it be hosting any devices (such as virtual machines) which also have an IP address?

Thanks