Re: [Veritas-bu] Nic Utilization


Hello,

We had a simple setup with several file servers (AFS) and one master /media server and one robot with two drives. The file servers and themaster / media server were connected via eth0 or bge0 actually to theregular LAN. But eth1 bge1 was connected to a private switch. The afsfile servers were configured to only use eth0 or bge0 and the bge1 eth1nic was assigned a private host name. (/etc/hosts) Netbackup wasconfigured with the clients to use these private names, eg: real nameengr06f and then we have engr06f-prv. Netbackup used engr06f-prv, so allthe backups went over the private network. I understand this setup ispretty common. The gentleman who set it up in the first place told me thatas I inherited it when he moved to greener pastures. :)

Now another group runs a bigger netbackup system that we hook into hereat NCSU and it has lots of media servers. But now everything (fileserver stuff and backups) runs on the primary nic and the other ports gounused. But because they have more (virtual) tape drives the backups gomuch faster because it can run 5 streams for 5 partitions. We don't seeissues with the file servers being noticeably slower during backups withthe new setup. We're backing up about 2TB of data total with theseservers.


Hope that helped.

Gary Gatling      | ITECS Systems
ITECS, BOX 7901   | Operations and Systems Analyst
NCSU, Raleigh, NC | Email: gsgatlin AT eos.ncsu DOT edu
27695-7901        | Phone: (919) 513-4572 (5C Page Hall)

On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 2:33 PM, Heathe Kyle Yeakley <hkyeakley AT gmail DOT com>
wrote:
      I had a question about how everyone else utilizes the NICs
      inside your
      master and media servers.

      I have 1 master and 2 media. Like most systems these days, I
      have 3-4
      NICs in each one. The administrator that setup our existing
      environment
      plumbed 1 NIC per machine, and the other NICs sit there,
      completely
      unused. At night, when our backup are running, it isn't unheard
      of for
      the NICs on all three machine to reach a high utilization level.

      This got me to thinking. I've read that you can set an option in
      the
      bp.conf file and have various clients backup to different
      interfaces on
      the same physical master and/or media server, but I've never
      actually
      deployed that feature. I've also heard of a technology called
      Link
      Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) that allows you to tie
      multiple NICs
      together to increase the total bandwidth into your server.

      Does anyone else employ these technologies?
      Does everyone else just plumb one NIC and let the backups
      trickle in as
      fast as the LAN allows?
      Is there other aggregation technology out there that folks are
      using to
      utilize and squeeze more bandwidth out of those unused NICs?

      Thanks.

      - Heathe Kyle Yeakley

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