Cisco Catalyst 2960S Switch
Intel Dual Port NIC (teamed)
BroadComm Quad Port NIC (teamed 2 ports)
We hired a contractor to setup a fairly simple SQL cluster and SAN storage. With the above switch and NICs, they have teamed two cards on each server (3 servers total) for the domain network communication. There is no problem with the NIC teams, they are functioning fine, I have tested failover of each (unplug one of the cords).
The question I have is, would I gain any benefit from also creating an EtherChannel in my switch for each of these NIC teams? The contractor has not done this, and although everything is working fine, I want to get the top performance and reliability of this buildout.
Best Answer
Is the link currently saturated? If not, then configuring Etherchannel is not likely to do anything for you.
Link aggregation != better network performance (throughput) if the current link isn't saturated.