[rbridge] Summary 1 of load-balancing rbridges

[Joe Touch]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1



Joe Touch wrote:
> 
> 
> John Kristoff wrote:
> 
>>>On Thu, 11 Aug 2005 14:40:33 -0700
>>>Joe Touch <touch at ISI.EDU> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>That's when it would be useful to peek into not only the IP, but also
>>>>transport headers to mux across the pair of paths without reordering
>>>>within a transport connection.
>>>
>>>
>>>>From an operational perspective I'd prefer Alex's suggestion to use
>>>MAC addresses as the flow hash for load balancing.  It seems much
>>>simpler and seems to solve most of the problem.  Separate tools or
>>>other protocols can be used to achieve more perfect load balancing
>>>if it is needed.
> 
> 
> Load balancing by looking at IP and TCP headers is already common and
> solves the problem at hand (avoiding reordering within a transport
> protocol).
> 
> MAC-based load balancing, besides not helping with the case I cited,
> also fails for systems with multiple NICs that stripe a single transport
> across multiple interfaces (e.g., channel bonding). Granted, they're
> sort of 'asking for it', but it seems OK to use a fairly common
> technique if it solves this problem too.
> 
> Joe

PS - one final thought. We don't really need to spec any of this per se,
IMO. We can mention that per-MAC or per-transportflow is fine, and that
we leave it up to the rbridge implementation to decide which to support.
Again, so long as it's consistent within a single rbridge device it need
not be coordinated at all.

Joe
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFC/RutE5f5cImnZrsRAudFAJwKL3IMpxQCAt/WkQeVyPiXiFAHRwCdGG0w
SfZ31FjCoDlRU7Fq5fzZVX8=
=0+31
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----