Transmit load balancing across 3020s

[ADerusha]

First a disclaimer - I'm not a Cisco guy.

From what I understand, in the Cisco world you need to cluster switches in order to support 802.3ad transmit load balancing across multiple switches. Further, according to this: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps6748/products_installation_guide_chapter09186a008065b0fc.html the 3020 blade switches do not support clustering.

The question is thus - how does one setup transmit load balancing across the 2 (or 4) NICs in a blade enclosure equipped with 3020 switches?

[HEM_2]

correct, the Cisco 3020 switches do not support stacking/clustering so you can not create a channel across the 2 switches.

To get transmit load balancing, simply team the 2 or 4 NICs together. The Automatic teaming mode will try to negotiate 802.3ad and when it can't form a 2 or 4 port LAC channel it will fall back to the Transmit Load Balancing Mode.

Teaming Whitepaper:
http://h71028.www7.hp.com/ERC/downloads/4AA0-1139ENW.pdf?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN

[ADerusha]

And of course I screwed up my original post - what I'm actually looking for is receive load balancing. Is there any way to support this? If not, how is the receiving NIC determined? For example, the configuration I'm looking at has the 2 onboard NICs + 2 additional ports connected to 4 3020s. How does one determine which of the 4 NICs will receive incoming traffic?

[HEM_2]

With Transmit Load Balancing the receiving NIC is determined by the teaming software. It is usually the NIC that is first initialized that will be the receiving NIC. If you want to specify a NIC to be the receiving NIC, you can change the mode to "Transmit Load Balancing with Fault Tolerance and Preference Order". Then the NIC with highest preference will be designated the receiving NIC, i.e. it will be TX/RX and the others will be TX Only.

There was a teaming mode called Dual Channel SLB or Dual Channel 802.3ad that would give you Send and Receive Load Balancing but it was only available via purchasing an INP (Intelligent Networking Pack) license. This license however is no longer available. I'm not sure how you can get those modes of teaming now:

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/proliantessentials/inp/index.html?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN

[HEM_2]

oh and the above "teaming" stuff I was talking about is for Windows only.

You are in better luck with Linux and bonding. If you use bonding mode 6 (balance-alb) you can get send and receive load balancing. See balance-alb from here:

http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/networking/bonding.txt