I have a FreeNAS machine which has 4 ethernet ports on it. I’d like to setup LACP so I can get more than 1 Gbit of traffic on/off the NAS. In order to do this, I need to make some changes to both my FreeNAS machine and my switch.
Something that should be kept in mind is that LACP doesn’t give you more bandwidth between a fixed pair of entities. It gives you more bandwidth total, but it can’t exceed 1 Gbit (for 1 Gbit ports) between any 2 entities. Thus, if you have 3 systems, one of which uses 2x 1 Gbit ports in LACP, the other 2 systems could each copy files on/off at 1 Gbit.
Configuring an LACP Port Channel
The order of operations here is:
- (re)configure FreeNAS
- (re)configure the switch ports
(re)configuring FreeNAS
(re)configuring the switch ports
The switch I’m currently using is a Cisco 2960G. Its currently setup with a sinigle port (gi0/40) as an access port on vlan 200:
1 int gi0/40
2 description FreeNAS
3 switchport access 200
It needs to be changed. We want to end up with 4 ports configured the same. Same channel group, same channel protocol. Then we want to configure our port-channel (cisco speak for a logical port aggregation). The port-channel is where we will define our port mode and vlan.
1 int port-channel 1
2 description FreeNAS
3 switchport access 200
4 int gi0/40
5 description FreeNAS
6 channel-group 1 mode on
7 channel protocol lacp
8 int gi0/41
9 description FreeNAS
10 channel-group 1 mode on
11 channel protocol lacp
12 int gi0/42
13 description FreeNAS
14 channel-group 1 mode on
15 channel protocol lacp
16 int gi0/43
17 description FreeNAS
18 channel-group 1 mode on
19 channel protocol lacp
If all went well, you should be able to run:
1
2 Router# show interface port-channel 1
3 Port-channel1 is up, line protocol is up
4 Hardware is GEChannel, address is 0013.19b3.7748 (bia 0000.0000.0000)
5 MTU 1500 bytes, BW 4000000 Kbit, DLY 10 usec,
6 reliability 255/255, txload 1/255, rxload 1/255
7 Encapsulation ARPA, loopback not set
8 Keepalive set (10 sec)
9 ARP type: ARPA, ARP Timeout 04:00:00
10 No. of active members in this channel: 4
11 Member 0 : GigabitEthernet0/40 , Full-duplex, 1000Mb/s Member 1 :
12 GigabitEthernet0/41 , Full-duplex, 1000Mb/s Member 2 : GigabitEthernet0/42
13 , Full-duplex, 1000Mb/s Member 3 : GigabitEthernet0/43 , Full-duplex,
14 1000Mb/s
15 Last input 00:00:05, output never, output hang never
16 Last clearing of "show interface" counters 00:04:40
17 Input queue: 0/75/0/0 (size/max/drops/flushes); Total output drops: 0
18 Interface Port-channel1 queueing strategy: PXF First-In-First-Out
19 Output queue 0/8192, 0 drops; input queue 0/75, 0 drops
20 5 minute input rate 0 bits/sec, 0 packets/sec
21 5 minute output rate 0 bits/sec, 0 packets/sec
22 0 packets input, 0 bytes, 0 no buffer
23 Received 0 broadcasts (0 IP multicasts)
24 0 runts, 0 giants, 0 throttles
25 0 input errors, 0 CRC, 0 frame, 0 overrun, 0 ignored
26 0 watchdog, 0 multicast, 0 pause input
27 3 packets output, 180 bytes, 0 underruns
28 0 output errors, 0 collisions, 0 interface resets
29 0 babbles, 0 late collision, 0 deferred
30 0 lost carrier, 0 no carrier, 0 PAUSE output
31 0 output buffer failures, 0 output buffers swapped out
and see that all 4 ports are being used. If you want to test failover, you should be able to unplug 1 (or more, but not a total greater than the number of ports - 1) cable and continue talking to your device (for example, ping).
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