LAGG Switch 16 Port for Opnsense

[crissi]

Hello,

im looking for a 16 Port Switch to enable LAGG for my OPNsense. I found a cheap Netgear GS116E what can do Static LAG, not dynamic.

Do anyone else have the Netgear GS116E Plus Switch, and use it successfully for LAG with OPNSense?

Thx!

[Patrick M. Hausen]

I use the Cisco WS-C2960L-16TS-LL with great success. I paid around 200€ refurbished with warranty.

[crissi]

Thx, Cisco would be nice, but i need from the height a flat switch, for me to understand, the switches must support lag proto LACP to get the aggregation to work with OPNsense ?

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Correct.

[crissi]

Thank You!
br

[crissi]

Hello,

i got yet my cisco switch, and managed to get the lag setup running.

lagg0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
   options=900028<VLAN_MTU,JUMBO_MTU,NETMAP>
   ether 00:e7:68:29:3b:fc
   inet6 fe90::2e0:68ff:fe29:3bfc%lagg0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0xb
   inet 192.168.200.1 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.200.255
   laggproto lacp lagghash l2,l3,l4
   laggport: igb4 flags=1c<ACTIVE,COLLECTING,DISTRIBUTING>
   laggport: igb5 flags=1c<ACTIVE,COLLECTING,DISTRIBUTING>
   groups: lagg
   media: Ethernet autoselect
   status: active
   nd6 options=21<PERFORMNUD,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>

I have at the moment the attached settings in Opnsense Interfaces - Other Types - LAGG

Can you please give me some advice, if i should change here some settings? Or if i do need to change some Tuneables in Opnsense, to get the best performance out between switch and opnsense LACP?

Thx!

[Patrick M. Hausen]

I would set the lagghash to l2,l3 to match what Cisco does. That's the "layers" option in OPNsense, IIRC.

Apart from that, no, nothing to tune. You are aware that you won't get twice the throughput of a single interface for a single connection? Multiple traffic flows will be balanced across both links, but the peak bandwidth of a single flow will always be that of a single interface.

[crissi]

Thanks for your Reply. I'm planning to migrate my File Servers to Ubuntu, and would then use Nic Bonding, to have a bit more throughput, hopefully. As i have on my LAN Interface several Vlans, would it made sense to expand the LAG from 2 till 4 Interfaces, to balance all the traffic better?

Are the Hash Layer Values like L2 / L3 depending if the Switch is in Layer 2 or Layer 3 Routing Mode?

Regarding the Option to mark Fast Timeout, would I have to mark this if I change on the switch LACP Timeout from Long to Short?

[Patrick M. Hausen]

How many parallel clients will you have accessing those file servers? Let me repeat: 2 or 4 interfaces will not speed up a single connection or even multiple connections from one client. One particular client to one particular server will always use just a single interface.

Multiple clients to one or multiple servers will be balanced across the interfaces according to a hash value computed from the source and destination MAC address (layer 2) and IP address (layer 3) - that's what the lagghash does. Cisco uses only l2 and l3, so I would disable l4 on the FreeBSD side.

Timeout - sorry, no clue. You will have to google that

[crissi]

I would have 6-8 Clients accessing the servers in parallel, so would LACP not the right way to go?

I will check how to disable L4 on FreeBSD, thx

[Patrick M. Hausen]

It is the only way to go. I just wanted to make clear that it is not giving you 2 Gbit (4 Gbit ...) bandwidth for one client.
There is no technology that does that.

If 6-8 clients are maxing out a single Gigabit (or 10 Gigabit) link to the point where you need multiple of them, by all means go ahead.

[crissi]

Thank You for your Help