LACP with 10gbe and 1gbe interfaces?

[Greg_E]

I just upgraded one of my servers to a pair of 10gb interfaces and deleted the onboard 1gb interfaces. I was running LACP on the 1gb, and have now configured LACP on the 10gb interfaces. I was checking in the networking tab and noticed that I can add the 1gb interfaces back into the LAG, but I seem to recall that this might not be the best idea to mix ports of different speeds within the same LAG. Can anyone confirm this as a bad idea, or correct my thinking that this isn't an issue?

I did read how FreeNAS handles the aggregated connections, and with up to 55 computers all using this server at once, I should get a good spread across the interfaces in the LAG, but if I could get the 1gbe interfaces back into this LAG, then I would have a little better connection if I had a failure.

All the clients are 1gb.

OS is 11.1-u7 until I can get the down time to upgrade to 11.2-uX

Mainboard is a Supermicro X10-DRi with 32gb of RAM (might double this), and eight 10tb hard drives on the internal SATA ports (yes I know, not the best speed) configured in RAIDZ1 (about 60TB for the array).

Files are mostly audio (wave 44.1khz and 16 bit) or video (mostly mpeg2 compression at 35mbps but might go to DNxHD at 145mbps after testing).

Switches are Enterasys C5125k series with a mix of 24 port and 48 port, 10gb on the SFP+ (XFP) interfaces with optical SR at 850nm.

 

[HoneyBadger]

Your switch probably won't allow you to mix port speeds in an LACP group; and yes, you're recalling that it's a bad idea because the load balancing might put traffic down a 1Gbps link when there's still bandwidth/availability in the 10Gbps links.

2x10Gbps is fine, set up notifications on your switch and FreeNAS to alert you of a degraded link, and move a different traffic type (management?) onto the 1Gbps lines.

 

[Greg_E]

I think you are right, I think I tried to put the 1gb and 10gb into the same lagg and the switch would not allow it. Thanks for the sanity check. In reality I should only need about 7200mbps at any given time, not sure if the disks will even give this (but I'm going to test for it). Really just want the lagg in case one link fails so I'll get a not very graceful failover, but failover it will do.