combining/teaming two ethernet sources on a switch

[trizic]

i have both power line and wifi to ethernet bridge that i want to team together. i purchased a netgear prosafe gs108e v3 in hopes of LAG being what i want (perhaps i need a gs108t).

what is the cheapest solution so my single gigabit port ESXI server uses the best link or combination? fastest should be the 802.11ac bridge, or the powerline which is at 20mbps but stable when the wifi is not performing.

from my understanding, link aggregation switches 802.3ad is not what i want, it requires 2 connections from the router and two connections into a server that has dual nic. in my case i only have one nic and i want and client on the switch to use the wifi to ethernet bridge or powerline based on which has more bandwidth available. correct me if i am wrong

basically i want some sort of dual wan but inside my network.

1. what happens if you plugin two ports from the router into an unmanaged switch? which link will clients connected to switch use?

2. is there a solution to use a tomato/dd-wrt router? i understand that there are some dual wan scripts but if you disable dhcp (because my main router is a pfsense box) does it render dualwan useless?

3. i am assuming this can be done via VLAN? where the esxi server gets two tagged interfaces and determines which is best from there? ideally i would want the switch to manage this and not the OS

thanks in advance

 

[azazel1024]

1) You get a switching loop and generally both the router and the switch crunch hard until you disconnect and possibly power cycle them. If the switch or router happen to have spanning tree (a few dumb switches and a few non-advanced routers have it) then it'll disable one of the links. If it is good/smart spanning tree implementation, it'll re-enable that link if it detects that the primary has been disconnected.

2) With DD-WRT you should be able to do dual WAN as well as LACP, depending on the router. DHCP doesn't matter so long as whatever on either side of the router has an IP address (assigned from something else or static)

3) No, VLANs won't do this at all. It is going to be up to the router (and you will need a router) to determine what goes over which link.

Honestly I think you have a rats nest of a solution and need to just pick one interface and stick with it. Determining which is the better link when is a non-trivial process which might be more or less insurmountable without significant amounts of coding on your part and messing with the windows netstack so that it'll pick whatever is the best interface at the time (if you hook the powerline and WLAN bridge directly to the machine). If they are connected through a switch or router, you'll need to kludge the result you want on the switch/router's OS/firmware. Basically you'll need a router.

You could maybe/possible do LACP from the switch, through the ethernet to WLAN bridge and powerline adapter, but they'll both need to go to the same end target too (a LAG is treated as a single destination and if it is not, you'd have problems), either another switch that they are both plugged in to with LACP/LAG or else another machine with the NICs that are plugged in to setup in a team.

Windows for teaming does not support unequal link speeds (downstream it would be fine). It CAN be done AFAIK, but what is likely to happen is both will perform at the speed of the slowest link, or else the traffic will be speed agnostic so the best link isn't necessarily going to be choosen at any given time. Switches ARE speed senstive, but they can't (AFAIK) evaluate anything like current wifi or powerline modulation speed, only the wired port speed.

With a dual WAN router this can be done, but I still think you are up a creek in determining ACTUAL speed of the link. The best you can do is manually input the WAN speed of each port and assign rules for load balance/fail over.