Slightly OT – Curious about effective link aggregation (trunking) in OSX

[Nick Vasilopoulos]

Hi Ed,

Yes you can uplink from your switch to a NAS, but it depends on your switch. I’ve got similar hardware to you (QNAP 879) and have been beating a similar path as you – to get more bandwidth – via link aggregation, balance -rr, etc – I even went as far as purchasing the 10G card for the QNAP and have been testing it.
But back to the switch. I’ve recently upgraded after a long search to Brocade ICX 6450-48 switches which have 2 10GbE SFP ports and 2 1GbE SFP ports. (the 2 1G ports can become 10G ports with a license upgrade – i.e, more money). You can use the 10G for uplinking to another exact model switch (and then manage the switches as 1 device via IP/GUI) or you can turn off trunking for this port and simply use it to connect to a 10G NIC – like the one in my QNAP.

I will update this thread with my findings.

And BTW, I have no affiliation with any company mentioned, I’m just a paying customer!

Best,

Nick

[Ed Murphy]

Hi Nick,

I would be interested in your findings. We elected to shelve the idea of getting a more expensive switch to try and achieve a 10G uplink to the QNAP – mostly because I couldn’t find anyone to definitively confirm that would work. But, we are still within our 30-day return window!

Have you successfully connected your switch to your 879 via 10G and with multiple clients on the 1G side of the switch? What kind of speed enhancements have there been, if any?
I’m very interested to hear about your experiences.

Thank you,

Ed Murphy
Senior Editor / Technical Director
David Lynch Foundation Television

[Christoph Tilley]

Hi, I just ordered a Synology DS3612xs and I’m curious for the best setup for us.
The NAS will be connected via single Gbit link to the network. Which is fine for all workstations just doing backups. But for one workstation (MacPro) I would need 10GbitE for very fast file transfers. This workstation has to be connected to the regular GbitE LAN too.

I was thinking of buying two 10GbitE-PCIe Cards, one for the NAS, one for the MacPro and connecting them together.

But how does the OS know to go the 10GigE route instead of the regular Gbit route?

Thanks in advance! Chris

[Eric Hansen]

– direct connect the 10GbE card on the Mac Pro to the 10GbE card on the NAS. you can’t go through a switch.

– put them both on the same subnet (ie, NAS on 192.168.150.10, MP on 192.168.150.20). it has to be something different than the office network subnet, otherwise the Mac Pro will try to connect over the 1GbE port.

– bring up “Connect to Server” with Command-K on Mac Pro. Enter 192.168.150.10

– enjoy 10GbE goodness

of course, i skipped a lot of configuration steps, which I won’t go into here. I’ve never used this NAS. It looks interesting. But these steps should work for most any NAS.

e

Eric Hansen
Production Workflow Designer / Consultant / Colorist / DIT
https://www.erichansen.tv