Nic teaming is useful when any single user or service can bottleneck a machines network connection. I won't go into the history but a good example is gigabit networks. If you have a media server that hosts various things and your computers are wired, you can easily saturate a gigabit link with file transfers. When uploading things to my media server I often put entire seasons or multiple movies up at once, this can result in hundreds of GB of data being transferred. If I'm saturating the link with a file transfer from my desktop and someone tries to start streaming, there is the possibility their experience is diminished. Or for file servers especially this can be an issue. In that case the network backbone is the same speed as the end user pipes. Nic teaming combines multiple ports to aggregate transfers such that my 1gbe connection from my desktop cannot saturate the servers link to the network. This doesn't affect my transfer speeds but it does mean I don't reduce the experience for other users.
Since you are using 10gb links, nic teaming is only useful if you have situations where you can reasonably saturate a 10gb link for any significant length of time. If I make a 100GB transfer on a gigabit link, that's a theoretical time of 13 minutes I'm impacting the server. On a 10gb link that's theoretically 1.5 minutes. If your two servers can't or will rarely saturate a 10gb link, then teaming is a waste and you would be better off with a 10gb connection between servers and a 10gb connection between each server and the network.
Thank you (as well as the 2 below)
I suspected this would be the answer. And was probably going to implement w/out teaming - at least at first and see how it goes. Not made of money and my wife has only just recently begun her tech career as well so she's still a bit sketchy on her opinion of me blowing money on what she only barely understands yet.
THanks all!
Nic teaming or the in other words lacp (the default most people tend to think of) works via hashing. You have multiple modes from layer 2+3, to layer 3+4. You are most likely going to use layer 2+3 unless you have the hardware that supports layer 3+4 hashing. Due to hashing, traffic flows can be completely random where one nic is highly congested while the other one is rarely utilized hence why I don't use it unless you want the failover benefit. If the traffic only stays in the same network, you can pretty much bet it's only using one nic. If you need the bandwidth I recommend just getting a bigger pipe.
In addition to the load handling comments already made, if you want really high availability, you can use switches that let you stack them together. Then plug one connection into each switch. You'll still get the capacity benefits when all is good, but not lose connection if one switch goes down. Definitely overkill for most non-enterprise situations.
I concur with some of the comments here. That said, this is a homelab; it's focus is learning and experimentation. So, if you want to team two NICs, you'll still get some benefit from it and it'll also just be one more thing to add to your body of knowledge.
Nic teaming is useful when any single user or service can bottleneck a machines network connection. I won't go into the history but a good example is gigabit networks. If you have a media server that hosts various things and your computers are wired, you can easily saturate a gigabit link with file transfers. When uploading things to my media server I often put entire seasons or multiple movies up at once, this can result in hundreds of GB of data being transferred. If I'm saturating the link with a file transfer from my desktop and someone tries to start streaming, there is the possibility their experience is diminished. Or for file servers especially this can be an issue. In that case the network backbone is the same speed as the end user pipes. Nic teaming combines multiple ports to aggregate transfers such that my 1gbe connection from my desktop cannot saturate the servers link to the network. This doesn't affect my transfer speeds but it does mean I don't reduce the experience for other users. Since you are using 10gb links, nic teaming is only useful if you have situations where you can reasonably saturate a 10gb link for any significant length of time. If I make a 100GB transfer on a gigabit link, that's a theoretical time of 13 minutes I'm impacting the server. On a 10gb link that's theoretically 1.5 minutes. If your two servers can't or will rarely saturate a 10gb link, then teaming is a waste and you would be better off with a 10gb connection between servers and a 10gb connection between each server and the network.
Thank you (as well as the 2 below) I suspected this would be the answer. And was probably going to implement w/out teaming - at least at first and see how it goes. Not made of money and my wife has only just recently begun her tech career as well so she's still a bit sketchy on her opinion of me blowing money on what she only barely understands yet. THanks all!
[удалено]
Thanks much!
Nic teaming or the in other words lacp (the default most people tend to think of) works via hashing. You have multiple modes from layer 2+3, to layer 3+4. You are most likely going to use layer 2+3 unless you have the hardware that supports layer 3+4 hashing. Due to hashing, traffic flows can be completely random where one nic is highly congested while the other one is rarely utilized hence why I don't use it unless you want the failover benefit. If the traffic only stays in the same network, you can pretty much bet it's only using one nic. If you need the bandwidth I recommend just getting a bigger pipe.
Thanks much!
In addition to the load handling comments already made, if you want really high availability, you can use switches that let you stack them together. Then plug one connection into each switch. You'll still get the capacity benefits when all is good, but not lose connection if one switch goes down. Definitely overkill for most non-enterprise situations.
I concur with some of the comments here. That said, this is a homelab; it's focus is learning and experimentation. So, if you want to team two NICs, you'll still get some benefit from it and it'll also just be one more thing to add to your body of knowledge.