Every production infrastructure knows the importance of load balancing the network traffic to increase efficiency.
Let’s say you have multiple links in your environment and want to use the potential of all the links or want to have a backup configuration in case a link fails, load balancing will come to your rescue.
Today we will talk about two load-balancing modes
- Active-Backup
- Balance-slb
To know more about the load balancing configuration and AHV networking in detail, give the following document a read
AHV Networking Best Practices Guide
So how to make a decision regarding active-backup and balance slb?
This comparison might help you
Advantages of Bond Mode for the active-backup
- Default bond mode is active-backup.
- One interface in the bond carries traffic and all the other interfaces in the bond are used only when the active link fails.
- Active-backup is the simplest bond mode that easily allows connections to multiple upstream switches without any additional switch configuration.
Disadvantages
- Traffic from all the VMs uses only the single active link within the bond.
- All backup links remain unused until the active link fails. In a system with dual 10 GB adapters, the maximum throughput of all the VMs running on a Nutanix node is limited to 10 Gbps, the speed of a single link.
Advantages of Bond Mode for balance-slb
- Balance-slb bond mode in OVS (Open vSwitch) takes advantage of all the links.
- Rebalance VM traffic from the interface that is used extensively to less used interfaces. When the configurable bond-rebalance interval expires, OVS uses the measured load for each interface and the load for each source MAC hash to spread traffic evenly among links in the bond.
- Traffic from some source MAC hashes may move to a less active link to more evenly balanced bond member utilization.
Disadvantages
- Perfectly even balancing may not always be possible. The balancing depends on the number of traffic streams and their sizes.
Note: Always consider reading AHV Networking Best Practices Guide before making a decision.
So how can we configure these load balancing modes?
Give the following KB a read to help you understand more about the modes and the configuration commands.
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