Use shared or dedicated ports
Suggest changes
PDFs
You can use dedicated ports for intercluster communication, or share ports used by the data network. In deciding whether to share ports, you need to consider network bandwidth, the replication interval, and port availability.
|
You can share ports on one peered cluster while using dedicated ports on the other. |
Network bandwidth
If you have a high-speed network, such as 10 GbE, you might have enough local LAN bandwidth to perform replication using the same 10 GbE ports used for data access.
Even then, you should compare your available WAN bandwidth to your LAN bandwidth. If the available WAN bandwidth is significantly less than 10 GbE, you might need to use dedicated ports.
|
The one exception to this rule might be when all or many nodes in the cluster replicate data, in which case bandwidth utilization is typically spread across nodes. |
If you are not using dedicated ports, the maximum transmission unit (MTU) size of the replication network should typically be the same as the MTU size of the data network.
Replication interval
If replication takes place in off-peak hours, you should be able to use data ports for replication even without a 10-GbE LAN connection.
If replication takes place during normal business hours, you need to consider the amount of data that will be replicated and whether it requires so much bandwidth that it could cause contention with data protocols. If network utilization by data protocols (SMB, NFS, iSCSI) is above 50%, you should use dedicated ports for intercluster communication, to allow for non-degraded performance if node failover occurs.
Port availability
If you determine that replication traffic is interfering with data traffic, you can migrate intercluster LIFs to any other intercluster-capable shared port on the same node.
You can also dedicate VLAN ports for replication. The bandwidth of the port is shared between all VLANs and the base port.