{"id":627,"date":"2012-03-24T17:30:12","date_gmt":"2012-03-24T17:30:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/joelinoff.com\/blog\/?p=627"},"modified":"2026-06-28T17:38:31","modified_gmt":"2026-06-29T00:38:31","slug":"openindiana-151a-nic-aggregation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/joelinoff.com\/blog\/?p=627","title":{"rendered":"OpenIndiana 151a NIC Aggregation"},"content":{"rendered":"My colleagues and I recently built a filer using OI 151a\/ZFS and wanted to increase the throughput by aggregating multiple NICs to a common IP address that is dedicated for data. We did it by physically adding a card with 4 NICs, aggregating the ports on server and then updating the switch to enable link aggregation (port trunking) on the 2 connections.\n<!--more-->\n<h1>Step 1 &#8211; Add the PCI card<\/h1>\nFor this filer, we added a 4 NIC PCI\/e mezannine card to the server.\n\n<h1>Step 2 &#8211; Aggregate the NICs on the server<\/h1>\nI then logged into the server as root and aggregating the NIC&#8217;s. This process was slightly different than the what I found on the web because OI 151a is based on Solaris 11. Here is what I did.\n\n\n<pre class=\"wp-block-code\"><code>% # Turn off the automatic network management\n% svcadm disable \/network\/physical:nwam\n\n% # Show the links\n% ifconfig -a\n% dladm show-link\n\n% # Unplumb the current physical devices (from show-link)\n% ifconfig bnx0 unplumb\n% ifconfig bnx1 unplumb\n\n% # Create the aggregation, name it \"aggr1\"\n% dladm create-aggr -l bnx0 -l bnx1 aggr1\n\n% # Create the plumbing for it\n% ifconfig aggr plumb\n\n% # Assign the IP address\n% ifconfig aggr 192.168.1.200 netmask 255.255.255.0 up\n\n% # Verify that it is up\n% ifconfig -a\n% dladm show-aggr<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n<h1>Step 3 &#8211; Program the Switch<\/h2>\nFinally we needed to enable link aggregation (aka Port Trunking) on the switch to make sure that it can handle multiple MACs for a single IP address. If you don&#8217;t do this, performance will degrade to be worse than a single port because the switch will keep getting confused by different MACs.\n\nThis step is different for all switches. I have done it with a Cisco Catalyst 3750 and one of my colleagues did it with a Netgear GS176T. The instructions for doing it can be found in the user manuals.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My colleagues and I recently built a filer using OI 151a\/ZFS and wanted to increase the throughput by aggregating multiple NICs to a common IP address that is dedicated for data. We did it by physically adding a card with 4 NICs, aggregating the ports on server and then updating the switch to enable link &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/joelinoff.com\/blog\/?p=627\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">OpenIndiana 151a NIC Aggregation<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[19],"class_list":["post-627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sysadmin","tag-openindiana-zfs-opensolaris-nic-aggregation-port-trunking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/joelinoff.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/joelinoff.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/joelinoff.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joelinoff.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joelinoff.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=627"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/joelinoff.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1793,"href":"https:\/\/joelinoff.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627\/revisions\/1793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/joelinoff.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joelinoff.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joelinoff.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}