Using Two Gigabit NICs

[Jim Rogers_5]

I have been reading about how to best configure a system with two Gigabit NICs. I would like some recommendations about how to best utilize dual NICs. We are running a L2000 on HP-UX 11.0. We will be running a Oracle 9i DB on this server. It also runs an ERP software through Cognos Powerhouse. I have configured the NICs with different IP addresses, but would like to know what else I need to do to get the most from these.

[D Block 2]

if one NIC is heavy loaded, then you migh try an HP product called APA. Balance network traffic over 2 nics using one Ip.

Oracle 9i listens to one IP for the servcies and is this separate compared to the ERP traffic ? Look at the glance statistics by Interface and see how the packets are going out also.. maybe load balancing using APA is one thought.

[Devender Khatana]

Hi,

As suggested earlier HP AutoPort Aggregation is the best option to be used for load balancing across multiple network cards.

Once configured in load balancing mode all your network traffic will be evenly distributed across both network adapters. You can assign one or more IPs to the same logical adapter which is formed by two physical adapters.

HTH,
Devender

[Arunvijai_4]

Hi,

Check out this link for High availability in terms of network and other params.

http://www.nasi.com/hp-ux_availability.php

-Arun

[Hakan Aribas]

You can use APA. You can do both failover and loadbalance by APA. In addition to failover & loadbalance, your total throuhput will inceare to 2x

Our all production servers are configured with APA (for example, lan3+lan5=lan900 - 2Gbit).

[Gavin Clarke]

We had APA on our L-classes, I didn't configure it though so I can't help with that.

I can tell you that the switch ports on the other end also need to be grouped when configuring APA.

It won't exactly get you a 2 Gigabit connection but it will prevent one connection getting swamped and hence better overall performance.

[Jim Rogers_5]

I am going to initially attempt to split the users across the two NICs. There are only 50-60 users for this server. So I will point half to lan1 and the other half to lan2. See if that works before investing the $1200 for APA. I really don't think we will come close to using the full bandwidth of either one of the NICs. Our current server has a single 100 Nic. there are some limits from it at times, but not huge.

[Andrew Belville]

Instead of manually splitting (since you've decided to go that route), you might consider using a round robin type scenario. In DNS (if you're using it) assign an alias that points to both of you IP addresses.

You'd then have all your users attach to the new alias (in DNS make sure to set the TTL fairly low here!). That way, each request to connect to your server will automatically rotate between the IP addresses and therefore somewhat balance the load for you.

This method can also be used as a pseudo failover technique as if one goes down, the users can just try to connect again and will eventually hit the one that works.

Hope that helps a bit.

[Bill Hassell]

Unless the users are generating massive amounts of traffic (distributed processing), splitting the logins won't have much effect. It's the large database trasnactions with large amounts of data that need to be split. Make sure that the LAN is actually a bottleneck. If the users are complaining about response time but there's no data passing over the LAN during these delays, then response time won't be improved at all (need Oracle tuning).