[OpenIndiana-discuss] Quick zone-networking question.

[Grant Albitz]

First ask yourself are you trying to increase bandwidth internally or externally. Your single 100/1000 Mbps ethernet line is not going to be a bottleneck for a 1.5Mbps t1 or any DSL line so if the answer is external than there is no point in doing anything.

If you are  worried about internal traffic then you could possibly give yourself more bandwidth by segmenting the traffic. Just keep in mind that having 2 lines doesn't mean you are getting twice the bandwidth, but you could have some services bound to the one link/ip and some to the others. 


 Your simple diagram doesn't depict a switch, if you were utilizing some form of lacp or etherchannel with a switch you could take 2 lines and bond them, but even then there are algorithms involved for how the traffic is load balanced and most of these result in a single host using only one path. If you were serving hundreds of workstations or your load actually does saturate a 1Gbps line then there is some benefit to teaming the adapters. Again that is purely for internal traffic only and you need capable hardware.



________________________________________
From: DormitionSkete at hotmail.com [dormitionskete at hotmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2013 1:26 PM
To: Discussion list for OpenIndiana
Subject: [OpenIndiana-discuss] Quick zone-networking question.

Hi, all.

This is probably a stupid question, but suppose we have a modem for a DSL or T1 line, and attached to it is a router, and attached to it is a server with two network cards.  And suppose I was to connect both network cards to the router.  So we have something like this:

              Modem
                   |
              Router
                 |   |
              Server

I was thinking to have our apache web server, email, and whatever other zones on one network card, and perhaps put our tomcat zone on the other, in my mind, to balance the load.  I was thinking since the web apps that we'll run on tomcat will be using ajax, it might like more bandwidth.

I've always thought of networking like pipes of water -- except it's data.  I don't know how valid that is.  But when I look at this, it seems like I have two pipes going into the router, and if that pipe going from the router to the modem is the same size, I wouldn't really get any benefit from doing this.

Am I right?  Should I not bother using both network cards like this?

I'm at the point where I'm done "playing" (i.e. testing), and am putting all this stuff together now.

Thanks.



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