Dell Emulex Family of Adapters - Manual (Page 807)

OneCommand NIC Teaming and VLAN Manager User Manual P009415-01A Rev. A
Appendix A. Load Balancing Use Cases
Perceived Port Load
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Appendix A. Load Balancing Use Cases
Perceived Port Load
This method automatically distributes TCP/IP traffic across team member channels by
examining traffic load history patterns.
When to Use
Favorable types of traffic patterns for this balancing method include web traffic (HTTP,
HTTPS) and e-mail traffic (SMTP, POP3). New TCP/IP connections are assigned to the
more lightly loaded member channel links to balance traffic loading across all members
over time. Only TCP/IP traffic is balanced and distributed (other non-connection
oriented traffic, such as UDP/IP), and non-IP traffic (such as IPX/SPX and others) is
assigned to a single default team member and is not balanced. Once a connection is
opened and assigned to a member link, that TCP/IP connection's traffic is never moved
to a new link without regard to the out-of-balance level the overall team might be
experiencing. There must be a consistent stream of new TCP/IP connections (and
typically a consistent stream of terminated TCP/IP connections which have finished
work) for this traffic balancing method to perform well. This type of process works well
for servers that process a lot of small transactional operations that start and then end
individual TCP/IP connections for each transaction. Some database protocols involve
new connections for each query and these also work well with this method.
When Not to Use
Connections that are very long lived or which are not TCP/IP based are a poor fit with
this choice of balancing technique. Examples of long-lived connections are most
TCP/IP storage traffic such as NFS (Unix/Linux, others), CIFS (Windows), and iSCSI
(widespread usage).
Destination MAC
This method is team member channel selection (hashing) based on the destination
MAC address.
When to Use
Use this method when the local system is the server and the server communicates
through a NIC team to a switch, and then to many other systems on the local subnet
(typically many client, laptop or desktop systems). To be effective, the remote systems
must be located on the same IP address subnet as the server team is located. Use this
method only when the server system communicates with many clients (or other
servers) on the local subnet. Only systems that are on the local subnet have highly
variant destination MAC addresses in Ethernet frames sent from the server system NIC
team to those systems.