Forum Discussion

BackupExecAdmin's avatar
BackupExecAdmin
Level 3
3 months ago

Flex appliance physical ports configuration

Hi folks,

We have one concern regarding ports allocation for our new Flex appliance, which has 6 x 10/25 GE ports (3 Dual Port cards) and one 4 x 1GE card.

 

We want to set :

  • Bond0 with 2 ports for the Primary Server instance.
  • Bond1 with 4 ports for the Media Server instance (MSDP).

Our concern is regarding the subnet, is it possible to create multiple Bond interfaces using the same subnet as our instances will be assigned IPs from the same subnet (Backup subnet). For example :

Backup subnet is 192.168.0.0/24, we would have :

  • Primary Server : Bond0 with 192.168.0.1.
  • Media Server : Bond1 with 192.168.0.2.

We know that we can create one 6 ports bond interface with the 192.168.0.0 subnet and assign this same bond for both Primary and Media with different IPs.

But with this configuration, we think that it won't physically isolate the traffic of Media instance from Primary instance, and we want to achieve some sort of QoS, and make sure that the Media Server will have the most of the bandwidth as it will be the one which transitions the backup data from our clients.

Also, we want to use Flex's "Remote Replication" feature with another Flex appliance (Same Specs), can we use the remaining 1GE interface ports ? (3 ports bonded as 3 GE logical port) as the first port is used by the appliance as management port (Host0). As we know, replication only concerns the primary server instance, so there's no significant data transfer.

Regards,

bandwidth
DESIGN
Flex Appliance 5260
netback
network
Replication
  • StefanosM's avatar
    StefanosM
    3 months ago

    You must create the bonds at the Flex level and then add networks (VLANs) to them. After that, you can create or assign IPs to the instances. As I recall, there is no way to use the same network to two interfaces.

    Also, I don’t see why you would want to use different network ports for the master server. There is no significant traffic to or from the master server. If you do indeed need to separate the traffic, you must use a different network VLAN for the master server.

    You can use the three 1G (or 10G for the 5260) ports as you prefer. FLEX OS treats them the same way as the 10G network ports.

     

     

     

  • StefanosM's avatar
    StefanosM
    Level 6
    15 days ago

    Consider the instances as separate systems. Anything you can do with physical systems, you can also do with Flex instances.

    You can use VLANs or create a new bond using two new network cards. You can either use the same media server instance with both networks or create a new media server instance for the new network.

  • StefanosM's avatar
    StefanosM
    Level 6
    3 months ago

    You must create the bonds at the Flex level and then add networks (VLANs) to them. After that, you can create or assign IPs to the instances. As I recall, there is no way to use the same network to two interfaces.

    Also, I don’t see why you would want to use different network ports for the master server. There is no significant traffic to or from the master server. If you do indeed need to separate the traffic, you must use a different network VLAN for the master server.

    You can use the three 1G (or 10G for the 5260) ports as you prefer. FLEX OS treats them the same way as the 10G network ports.

     

     

     

    • BKPEXEAdmin's avatar
      BKPEXEAdmin
      Level 3
      15 days ago

      Hi StefanosM 

      We also need to back up new clients who are in another complete subnet (DB subnet). So far, we've only used two network cards as bond0 for the backup subnet.

      Can we create another bond (bond1) in the DB subnet and assign it to our Media instance? In this way, our Media would have both Bonds (bond 0 and 1) assigned to it? We've found pairs of instance networks, so we think it's feasible this way.

      Or do we have to depend on VLANs?

      Thank you very much.