loadsharing with LACP - when 4x 1Gbit/s ≄ 4Gbit/s

[MichaelM55]

Well guys, I don´t need 10Gbit/s for interconnecting my buildings, at least for now. What I´d prefer is a LACP loadsharing solution on a switch doing perfect ethernet frame based load balancing (for some single stream applications) Why you´s ask? Well I having some old fibers laying around being capable of 1Gbit/s. But I have many of them, so I actually could do 2x, 4x, 8x link aggregations groups.

According to some blogs Brocade should achieve that kind of load balancing. But I actually prefer a "simple" (stackable) 24 port fiber only switch. Some months ago I also read that H3C´s S7500 series should also be able to do so, but cannot find it any longer.

So, what about HP/H3C products? Which one would be the right product?

[paulgear]

Hi Michael,

I use the HP switch selector http://h17007.www1.hp.com/au/en/products/switches/selector/ for finding the right model. Sometimes it lags behind the product announcements a bit, and lacks a feature to select operating system, but it's still very useful. It shows 3 Comware and 2 ProCurve switches that meet your criteria.

[Peter_Debruyne]

Hi Michael,

besides Brocade I do not know any other vendor which has dared putting this in production.

The big issue with packet based loadbalancing is always the in-order-delivery of tcp , since minor latency differences on the 2 links could cause a performance drop due to out of order arrival of packets.

What they do is actually very neat : they somehow measure the difference in latency on the links, communicate that to the neighbour switch, so the neighbour switch will transmit packets with a slight delay penalty on the faster link, so the packet-based loadbalanced packets actually arrive in-order on the remote switch.

This tech would come from the fibrechannel switches (I heard, no experience with it).

So in short : to my knowledge, there is no hp (procurve/comware) switch which can do this packet-based loadbalancing in hardware. (simple lacp flow-based link-agg is supported by all switches of course)

Best regards,Peter

[paulgear]

Yeah - that Brocade ASIC load balancing sounded pretty cool when i heard about it on Packet Pushers. Brocade seem to be doing some interesting stuff at the moment.

Michael, my suggestion about switches was not about the "perfect" load balancing, but about the switches which have 24 SFP ports. :-)