I remember seeing something like a 4 port switch pci card a few decades ago, but they're simply not useful anymore when you can buy a 4 port gig switch for 5 bucks from china now.
Any other 2-4 port card treats them as standalone nics each, and really aren't meant to be bridged together on a workstation or server. As Mac and I stated, it's more for redundancy to one or more switches.
Bridging from physical to virtual interfaces for virtual machines is the primary use case for any bridging at all in a server, and should best be left at that outside of network appliances.
I don't see why there is any aversion to running a switch to do this vs. a ring topology.
I'll have to look. But I think there are ethernet controllers with small switching fabric in them.
That might be a level of scaling that would maybe work.
On Sat, Oct 5, 2019, 9:15 AM Donald Mac McCarthy <mac@oscontext.com> wrote:
Kelly,
Maybe I am missing something as to why this is a requirement. Is a ring
configuration using RSTP a requirement? If that is the case, I haven't
an answer that I think would help. I know RSTP allows for fast
convergence of failure, I just haven't come across a case where the
benefit mattered vs the complexity of scale. We tried to test RSTP when I
was a cluster administrator at a university, (802.1W must be better
than 802.1D right?) because a professor insisted that the performance of
distributed operations would be better. This was a 4 rack cluster of
~70 nodes. The performance tanked. After a lot of trial and error, we
settled on the architecture that I am attaching a drawing of using STP.
If redundancy and ease of operation is what you want - I would use
redundant switches and us Linux to create a bonded interface that is in
an active-passive state. You will have to use a non LACP bond (teaming)
as LACP does not work across switches. Your switch's backplane and
uplinks will be the only bottlenecks that would occur in the network.
Most enterprise switch manufactures build a backplane that can handle
the traffic that is possible to send through the all the ports combined
at theoretical max.
2 switches that have 2 or 4 port LACP bonds or if you use switches that
have proprietary stacking cables, use the stacking cable. Also have an
LACP to upstream switching as well.
Hopefully the drawing attahed will help.
I have run clusters of over 2500 nodes with a nearly identical
configuration. We used 4x 10Gb per node, 2 LACP bonds per node into 48
port switches. Those switches had a 6x 40Gb uplinks that were split in
LACP to 2 top of rack switches. Top of rack switches had 100Gb uplinks
to core. At the core were multiple internal networks as well as multiple
wan connections.
My point in talking about the size and speed is not to brag (well, kinda
- don't we all like cool toys), but to point out that this architecture
will work with 1Gb switches and machines of 6 nodes all the way to
thousands of nodes with bigger uplinks. You can scale the switching as
your hardware changes and scales. The architecture remains the same.
If you are only using 100 nodes, you have less complication. As for plug
and play like behavior, as long as you don't mac lock the switchports -
the switches wont care what you plug into them as long as the NICs are
properly configured.
Hope this helps. If I have missed something - I hope someone else finds
this useful.
Mac
kelly stephenson wrote on 10/4/19 3:34 PM:
Looking for some networking advice from the group.
The
system I have has several devices connected in a ring configuration
using one Ethernet port IN and one Ethernet port out. The system uses
RSTP for loop free operation. The idea is simplicity for installation,
you just unplug and plugin a new device in the ring plus you gain
redundancy, if one Ethernet cable breaks you still have another one.
This works but my client has never had more then a half dozen devices on
the network yet.
When I say devices just imagine very large
machines. The number of devices could be as many as 100 in the ring or
network. Everything I've researched on RSTP says over 8 devices and its
not effective/efficient so I'm researching other Ethernet
failover/failsafe/redundant solutions.
So, the local network
configuration needs to scale up to 100 devices, have redundancy, and low
latency for M2M control. Any thoughts?