I am configuring a hadoop cluster to prepare for our vendor to install its hadoop manager this week. The pre-installation checklist recommends that 1gb ethernet is not sufficient and that I should bond the two nics to double the bandwidth of each machine.
To do so, I'm trying to follow the instructions here to bond the nics:
http://www.unixmen.com/linux-basics-create-network-bonding-centos-6-5/
However this page mentions nothing about doubling network bandwidth, and lists several different types of bonding that can be performed such as adaptive transmit load balancing, active-backup, broadcast, and adaptive load balancing.
What should I do to double the bandwidth to these servers by bonding the nics? Is there a tutorial I can view to accomplish this?
Best Answer
No bonding mode doubles bandwidth of a single TCP or UDP connection, bonding just allows the bond to service multiple connections at once, where each connection could be the max speed of a single interface.
So say a bond with 4x 1Gbps NICs would never do 4Gbps over one session, but it could do a total of 4x 1Gbps sessions at the same time (or 8x 500Mbps sessions, etc).
If you need faster bandwidth for a single connection, get faster NICs.