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Andrej PirmanFlag for Slovenia

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Network port trunking as a simple switch

Hi,

I have QNAP NAS server TS 459 Pro+ which has two Gigabit Eth ports and supports port Trunking/Nic Teaming with teh following modes:
- Balance-rr
- Active Backup
- Balance XOR
- Broadcast Policy
- IEEE 802.3ad/Link Aggregation
- Balance-tlb
- Balance-alb

Is any of these modes usable to serve as a small 2-port SWITCH for connected devices?

I mean, I would connect 1 port to main network SWITCH, and another port to SERVER, so:
- QNAP would have connectivity with both, network AND server
- and SERVER would have connectivity to network via qnap's dual nic
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Qlemo
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There would be no advantage, and with those modes you can't use the ports separately anyway. The modes you showed are either for fallback in case of line failure, or allowing a dual-link connection providing double (theoretical) speed.

I doubt the NAS can make use of a 2GB link (because neither the disks nor the OS will allow for sustained throughput that high), but still it might serve more parallel requests with the two aggregated links. IMHO you should connect both Gb ports with a switch, and configure Link Aggregation. The switch will then be able to e.g. manage one stream for the server, and another for a client - or both for clients, or both for the server, if it also supports Link Aggregation.
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ASKER

Thank you for reply, but that was not what I am looking for. I know that already :)

Maybe my question was a bit confusing, so, let's go again:

NOW I have redundant NIC Team connected to Switch:
SERVER --------------------> Switch ------------------------> INTERNET
SERVER --------------------> Switch ------------------------> INTERNET

I want to add QNAP inbetween ,while not losing redundancy:
SERVER --------------------> Switch ------------------------> INTERNET
SERVER --------------------> NIC1-QNAP-NIC2 ------------------------> INTERNET

Meaning, QNAP would be configured a a little 2-port SWITCH and would also have NIC1 configured for local traffic to server.

Would this work?
According to the datasheet you can use the NAS in a Multi-IP config. But what for? Do you want to have the NAS isolated from your internal LAN? In that case I would recommend iSCSI for the server, if available - it is tailored for high-performance, dedicated, RAID-related traffic.
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Andrej Pirman
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I agree. You cannot use a receiving device as a switch, unless it offers Ethernet Bridging. A Windows PC with two NICs would allow for briding, for example, but no NAS.
Either it was misunderstood, or badly asked, but answers did not even touch my question. sorry for that.