Sorry, I'm currently out of the office.  

If this is concerning a UCA Information Technology matter that requires 
immediate attention, please contact the IT HelpDesk at 450-3107 or 
[email protected].

If your message was personal or of a "non-urgent" nature, I'll reply as soon as 
I can.

Wayne

>>> Andrew Hines <[email protected]> 11/25/13 05:29 >>>

Hello,

This will not help to answer James´s question, but I want to take the 
opportunity to relate a very interesting experience we had with our core LAGs 
just last week.

What I am about to relate may be common knowledge to everyone but myself, in 
which case please forgive the waste of your time.

Our two data center switches are connected to our backbone switch via LAGs with 
3 physical gigabit links.  Peak utilization has historically been about 1.5 
gigabits.  Then last week the systems guys decided to start syncing some of 
their SAN disks via the ethernet network instead of their fiber channel network 
("hey man we have another 1.5 gigs to spare"). This synchronization began 
consuming 1 gig of bandwidth, but because it was a single flow between two IP 
addresses the entire gig of traffic was assigned to a single physical gig link. 
 Has anyone ever stopped to ponder such a situation? Does the switch act like a 
load balancer and move the existing traffic or new flows to one of the other 
lesser used links?  Well the answer appears to be no.  And just let me warn you 
that the havoc created is not so easy to diagnose becuase it is not just a 
simple binary connectivity issue.  Some things work fine, others that just 
happen to have the LAG hash algorithm choose the oversubscribed link don´t 
work.  The only true way to discern what was happening was analyzing the 
individual link graphics where we saw that one of the individual links was 
oversubscribed causing massive packet discards (I have attached a photo but not 
sure if it will make it through to the list).

So the moral of the story is to monitor utilization on both the LAG and all the 
individual links that make up the LAG...

-Andrew

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