I have two 1Gig switches stacked together and want to connect 6 new devices with a 10G interface via a CRS312-4C+8XG
Should i only connect the CRS312 with two interfaces (one to each stack member) and have STP to disable one link or is there another other option to have both links active to the existing stack?
Not seeing LACP but i see bonding in there - not sure if and how i can use that for redundant connectivity between the CRS312-4C+8XG and the stack.
And if i would like to have my 6 new devices connected twice with 10G to two CRS312-4C+8XG, how would do i do that?
Mikrotik switches don’t support stacking, so you can’t do that using standard (LACP) bonding.
You could do it (at least partially) if your devices were running linux … linux bonding driver supports a few bonding types which don’t rely on switch to co-operate (e.g. balance-tlb or balance-alb).
OK, i understand bonding mode 4 does 802.3ad - but how do i use that?
When creating a bond with two interfaces, how would the remaining ports (bridge/switch) ‘attach’ to it on Layer-2
OK, no stacking between two switches…
But if it’s possible to bond the bridge/switch from CRS312 to the stack then i could do the same with a second CRS312 and connect the 6 devices via bonding mode 1 (active/backup) to both CRS312?
Don’t know yet how i would configure the CRS312 to get the bridge/switch bond to the stack - or do i have to use the SwOS with LAG and no bonding on the CRS312 but active-backup on the 6 Linux devices?
I had a quick look at the SwOS on the CRS312 but it has no SNMP v3 and also doesn’t provide any useful info via SNMP for monitoring as with RouterOS.
Re bonding interfaces: take two interfaces you want to use for a bond out of bridge. Then create a bond using those two interfaces as slaves and as last step add the newly created bonding interface to the bridge. Beware that not all modes are HW offloaded (per docs only 802.3ad and balance-xor).
One can always connect bonded interfaces from one host to different switches if the bonding mode doesn’t require support on the switch side. If you read through wikipedia article about link aggregation you’ll see numerous modes supported by linux (other network devices and OSes generally suport less different modes, but there are modes not supported by linux). All of them except for 802.3ad (LACP) work in some manner which doesn’t need any support from switch. This, however, comes with a cost: only one link is used for Rx (traffic from network towards host). Some modes use multiple links for Tx (which is fine for server serving numerous clienrs) and there’s a HA mode (active-backup).
If you use bonding mode that is supported by switch, then it’s best (if not required) that both switch and host use same mode.
I suggest you to run ROS on your CRS. As you noticed, ROS is much more versatile than SwOS… but offers same level of HW offload (same performance). The only con is tgat it’s harder to configure (due to its versatility).
That should work for my scenario - two CRS where each has an 802.3ad bond to the stack and the 10G devices are connected to each of the CRS with an active-backup bond for redundancy.