Load balancing over LAN/OPT ports

[jdcnosse]

So I do have a question, and I'm not sure if it's even possible or if it's worth it. I have two Intel NICs, one single port and one dual port. The single is the WAN, double is the LAN/OPT. What I'd like to do is to be able to connect both LAN and OPT to a switch and then connect devices to the switch, thereby (theoretically in my head) giving me twice as much bandwith to work with, within the LAN itself.

I also don't know if this would be necessary for intra-LAN communication or not.

[Derelict]

You can't get twice the bandwidth (meaning one stream/connection will get 2Gbit/sec) but you can LACP to your switch and it will put some traffic on one and some on another so if there are lots of hosts/states it will use both links effectively.

But that will only affect connections to the firewall. LAN-to-LAN connections through the switch will still be at switch speed and, thus, unaffected.

If you don't have gigabit+ WAN you're probably not going to see any benefit for the added complexity other than link redundancy to the firewall.