Any point in binding two interfaces with LACP?
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The box I have pfSense on has 5 NICs. I just realized 2 of those NICs are handling different VLANs– 1 has 2 VLANs, the other has 3 VLANs. pfSense doesn't see a ton of traffic from each VLAN. Just some internal routing and some internet traffic. My storage network is probably has the most traffic routing.
Would I see any benefit if I bound those 2 NICs in pfSense with LACP and tied all my VLANs to it? Or am I better off leaving it how it is?
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The benefits typically are:
1. Redundancy
2. Increased bandwidth (in some cases)If your switch supports LACP, or you have multiple stackable switches and they support LACP between switches, it's a great way to get redundancy.
If you have throughput needs, it's also a great way to get more throughput if you have multiple traffic streams between different devices.
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Potentially you could get much better bandwidth between two VLANs that were previously on the same NIC.
If everything is working fine for you though you might just want to leave it that way. ;)Steve
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Potentially you could get much better bandwidth between two VLANs that were previously on the same NIC.
If everything is working fine for you though you might just want to leave it that way. ;)Steve
That is my main concern. There have been many things in the past that I decided I wanted to change only to cause myself a bigger headache. :)
I am in the process of redoing my switch setup. I have 2 HP Procurve 1810G 24p switches that I have linked with fiber. LACP is supported on each switch but I can't do a port from each, unfortunately.
I just figured it'd be better to push all VLANs over the two bound ports than divide them up between two different ports. If I did that they could only go from pfSense to one of my switches. If I keep them divided, one NIC could go to switch 1 and the other NIC to switch 2.
How hard is it to setup LACP in pfSense? Is it picky about things or does it work well? Does LACP in pfSense support the added bandwidth benefit from binding two ports in it? Or is it just for redundancy?
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It's handled by the FreeBSD lagg(4) interface which can do both loadbalancing and failover (and some other stuff). It's worth noting though that it acheives the extra bandwidth by load-balancing the two connections. Thus to see any benefit you need to have multiple IP connections running across it. In your case that shouldn't be a problem because in routing between two VLANs via pfSense you will always have two streams connections.
Steve
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It's handled by the FreeBSD lagg(4) interface which can do both loadbalancing and failover (and some other stuff). It's worth noting though that it acheives the extra bandwidth by load-balancing the two connections. Thus to see any benefit you need to have multiple IP connections running across it. In your case that shouldn't be a problem because in routing between two VLANs via pfSense you will always have two streams connections.
Steve
I actually have a total of 5 VLANs that use the pfSense box as a gateway– 2 on one interface, 3 on the other.
I guess I should leave them separate rather than mess with combining them and possibly creating other issues. shrug