I've been working on a project getting a small VM Ware suite to connect to an NFS storage server with teamed and bonded NIC's From the outset, everything appears to be working as it should be, however I am finding that the data traveling to my NFS server appears to be using only one NIC.
Here is my setup:
3 ESX servers not identical in make up (If it is important to know the hardware of each machine I will gladly post it). Each server has two Intel Pro 1000 NIC cards teamed together for Service Console and NFS traffic and each has an additional Pro 1000 for production traffic.
1 NFS server. This is an Intel Core2Duo with two GB of ram, and Adaptec 2405 disk controller with 4 drives. One 1 TB Seagate hd running independently and three 300 gb 10k spin velociraptor drivers raided with a 256k stripe pattern. This machine has 4 1gbit NIC cards bonded together 1 PCIe Intel Pro 1000 and 3 Realtek PCI cards. I have setup the bond of the NICs to use Adaptive Load Balancing.
All ten NICs are connected to a Linksys 16port 1gb unmanaged switch, which is connected to a Linksys managed switch that has 24 100mb and 4 gb ports.
From all practical purposes, everything I have setup seems to show that it is all working and connected with no issue, however in watching my traffic I am not sure I am getting any benefit of the teamed NICs. When watching the machines interact, it appears that I am only getting traffic through the first port in my NFS server. I have stressed the system by getting all three ESX servers active, however what appears to happen is that all traffic contends for the first NIC in the bond. This also happens to be the odd card out as it is the PCIe Intel NIC.
I have read in a couple of sites that attempting to utilize the full four gb pipe of the bond can require a managed switch that will aggregate ports, but I have also read info saying this should not be necessary. I am not as interested at this point in fail over benefit as I am with obtaining the fastest throughput from server to storage and back that I can with the hardware I have. The managed switch I have does allow for aggregating ports, but does me little good in this case as it is 100 mb.
So..... Any advice or resources to research on this would be greatly appreciated. I am relatively new to a lot of what I am implementing here with this level of networking and NIC bonding but am very anxious to increase my knowledge and skills. I find it curious that the one card handling the traffic is the odd card out. My research has told me that as long as the cards are the same speed, they should bond together with little problems.
I am happy to include any further information needed as well, I am just not sure what is necessary to help out further from my end.
