Node Network Utilization

[Steve McGee]

I have a 2 node cluster with both gb NICs on each node spread across 2 stacked extreme x450e switches. I have been monitoring my throughput utilization of the two NICs on each node and noticed that node 1 will appear to have near equal utilization on both NIC ports, while node 2 appears to have one nic port with similar utilization as node 1, but the second nic port will have next to 0 utilization.

Has anyone seen this before?

I'm using ALB load balancing on both nodes.

[Bryan McMullan]

Is Node 1 the VIP? If so, that may be the reason for the increased traffic. There is additional traffic overhead for the VIP.

Are you using MPIO?

[Steve McGee]

I am using MPIO, but with VIP that doesn't matter does it?

If during heavy SAN disk access I'm seeing 30% on three of the four NICs it leads me to think that things aren't operating properly.

I can't say that I'm experiencing any issues, but I've not been a lefthand user but for a few months, so I'm not qualified to make that assumption yet :).

[Bryan McMullan]

ALB does not equate to fully balanced on each NIC. There are times when we have no traffic on one NIC and a bit on the other.

Try to fail the active NIC on node 2. If everything continues to work as expected, it is just the load balancing algorithm.

[Steve McGee]

I actually have already performed that procedure and everything appeared to function properly.

Thanks for the clarification.