SMC SMCGS24C-Smart, how do you LAG?

[spyrule]

Hello,

So I got one of these SMC SMCGS24C-Smart switches tossed in when I bought a used server (Dell DCS6005), and in its Quick Guide it says it can LAG up to 8 ports:

"Allows up to 8 ports within a single aggregation
Link aggregation eliminates bottlenecks in any network."

On the main website from SMC it also says the same thing:

http://www.smc.com/en-global/products/product/109/0


However, in the main admin guide I cannot find ANYTHING to do with LAG, and looking at this switch, it looks Layer 2 (which makes me think it should be able to do Link Aggregation).

Can anybody out there that has/had one of these, can it actually do LAG ?

 

[spyrule]

Sorry, dumb question...

What the heck is an LGA ?

 

[azazel1024]

Have you bothered to log in to the admin page for the switch?

Looking at the user guide, You simple go under the trunks tab and set membership for each LAG.

I am guessing its an issue of terminology that is throwing you off. LAG is also called trunking, occasionally teaming.

 

[azazel1024]

Sorry, dumb question...

What the heck is an LGA ?

Did you mean to ask what is LAG?

Link Aggregation Grouping. It groups together ports so that they can be used more or less as one unified connection. So you can create a LAG of two ports on two switches and connect the switches together to get a 2Gbps uplink between the switches.

You need LAG if you do teaming on a workstation/server so that you can connect multiple NICs to the switch and thus have increase bandwidth (it only increase aggregate bandwidth, NOT single connection bandwidth).

Though if you have Windows 8+, you do not need to do LAG to connect multiple NICs to a switch and increase bandwidth, as SMB Multichannel manages this. You would still need LAG to increase interswitch bandwidth however.

 

[spyrule]

Did you mean to ask what is LAG?

Link Aggregation Grouping. It groups together ports so that they can be used more or less as one unified connection. So you can create a LAG of two ports on two switches and connect the switches together to get a 2Gbps uplink between the switches.

You need LAG if you do teaming on a workstation/server so that you can connect multiple NICs to the switch and thus have increase bandwidth (it only increase aggregate bandwidth, NOT single connection bandwidth).

Though if you have Windows 8+, you do not need to do LAG to connect multiple NICs to a switch and increase bandwidth, as SMB Multichannel manages this. You would still need LAG to increase interswitch bandwidth however.

No, someone had posted an early comment saying :

"SMC SMCGS24C-Smart is very nice LGA"

I had no idea what they meants as LGA, but I guess they erased their comment.

I know what LAG is, however the main use for this for me is for my NAS, which I use as both a standard NAS, a Backup source for my wifes laptop (TimeMachine), and as well as an NFS/iSCSI drive for my VMWare cloud server (certification studies).

I was using a Linksys SRW2048 which is Layer 3 and supported LAG, however it was always crashing. I then got this SMC, but even if I enable trunking on the 3 ports required for my NAS, the NAS reports that it failed to establish 802.3ad on its ports.

Which makes me think the SMC isn't doing true LAG, just port grouping.

 

[spyrule]

Also,

It seems as though when I move the 3 ports that my NAS uses to a Trunk group, I then lose all connectivity to the NAS completely.

It's quite odd.

 

[azazel1024]

Yeah, it sounds like it is not using 802.3ad for dynamic link aggregation, only static, which sounds like your NAS does not support (IE supports only dynamic).

 

[spyrule]

Yeah, It doesn't look like Synology supports SLA only LACP LAG (although they do support Network Fault Tollerance on multiple ports).