Configuring DR4x00 for load-balancing among physical network interfaces (version 1.x and 2.

0)

 DR4x00 uses 802.3ad or balance-alb for nic bonding. Depending on the available slave interfaces,
DR4x00 can form a 4x1Gbps bond or a 2x10Gbps bond.
 Both 802.3ad and balance-alb provides load-balancing as well as high availability (failover)
among the slave interfaces.
 Load-balancing referred to is about using DR4x00 as the system receiving data from backup
applications, while the received data is distributed to the slave interfaces.
 Configuration considerations on balance-alb:
1. Balance-alb doesn’t need special switch side configuration.
2. Because of the nature of how balance-alb works, load-balancing won’t work across
subnets or routers.
3. Multiple backup application servers are needed in order to see load-balancing with
balance-alb. This is because that load-balancing is based on each backup application
server’s ARP table. A single server will only have one ARP entry in ARP table, which
dedicates traffic to only one specific DR slave interface.
4. Each backup application server’s ARP table needs to have different slave MAC addresses
for the DR4x00 IP, in order to see load-balancing to work. ARP tables may need to be
flushed if same MAC address is seen in all backup application servers’ ARP tables.
5. Checking and clearing ARP table:
 Checking on ARP table:
Linux: “arp -n”
Windows: “arp -a”

 Clearing/flushing ARP table/entry:

Linux: “ip -s -s neigh flush all”
Windows: “arp -d ip_addr”

 Configuration considerations on 802.3ad:

1. 802.3ad requires switch side configuration for forming the bond.
2. 802.3ad load-balancing always works, but special configurations are needed for certain
scenarios.
 802.3ad works fine when all systems are on same subnet, and
multiple backup application servers back up data to DR
 if just one server is pushing data to DR on same subnet,
and client network bandwidth is larger than single DR
physical link: as long as the client can generate multiple
tcp connections, switch can be configured using IP+port for
distribution of load; if client has multiple physical links,
switch can be configured with source MAC as distribution of
load
 if backup application servers are on separate subnet from
DR, switch side lacp config should be configured with
distribution method of IP+port, so multiple tcp connections
will get load-balanced