 Tom here from Learn Systems, and we're going to talk about how to use synologies with lag and LACP. Synology has a really straightforward process for doing this, but I will cover a couple of those details. I also want to say thank you to Synology for providing me with this Distation DS1621XS Plus for this review. And this is a demo unit we got from Synology. Now, there are probably other units that may have been better to do this demo on, because they have more ports than this has. But this is what I happen to have available right now for this video. And I am working on a review of this unit as a whole. But I wanted to cover the configuration for lag and LACP. I also will open up with, no, if you bond two 1-gig ports together, it does not automatically give you two gigs worth of throughput. I like to put this at the beginning of any of the videos I've done now on lag and LACP, because there's this assumption that if I tie four together, tie two together, the accumulation of them will give you all of that bandwidth. And I will throw that in a very short explanation. Each stream can be as much as a single link. What that means is if I have two, let's say, Windows computers, and we have some Windows shares set up on this, and each Windows computer will want to connect to this at one gig. Well, if both of them connect at the same time, there's only a single cable going to the Synology that will limit its connectivity to one gig, even those two computers that are both connected to gig, because they're sharing the bandwidth. But in that scenario, if we have two, like we do right here, cables going to this, and we bond them together, each other computer also connected on this particular switch would then be able to get their individual streams both at one gig, provided the Synology has fast enough drives to serve up the data, but they would have that connectivity. This is where lag and LACP come into play, where it does figure that out for you. But that does not mean if you have a computer that you've also bonded, if the streams don't get split, and this kind of becomes a little bit tricky because this protocol dependent, most protocols, and like Windows file sharing being one of them, is the standard method by which it works, a single stream, so that stream is only going to go across a single link. This is why connectivity, such as 10 gig, is better, which by the way, this does have 10 gig, so I want to get to that part of the review. 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Now, so I can play out the scenario for you and make sure you understand exactly how things are connected. This is the exact model that we're using, DS1621XS+, and this is what the back panel looks like on it, and it's pretty simple. There's a 10 gig port. We're not using it for Purpose's demo, but these ports right here, labeled as 13, are two one gig ports that we're gonna tie together. So we log into our Synology Distation Manager, and when we go over here to the Control Panel, then we go to Network, Network Interfaces, and we have these two are connected. As you can see, this one's disconnected. This is the 10 gig port. So we go here, and we see that they're both sets of DHCP. They both have IP addresses, but now we're going to create the bond. Really straightforward here. Now, when you create the bond, you have adaptive load balancing, does not require any network switch support and can connect to two different switches. This is kind of a neat way to do it, but it may not be the most efficient way to do it. That's one of the reasons Link Aggregation Protocol 802.380 LACP exists, because it is a better way to do this. But if you don't have a switch that supports this, there is the option for adaptive load balancing, XOR active standby. Active standby is more of a fault tolerant one, but there's scenarios where you may want to use that as well. So we're going to choose this right here because I do have a unified switch that supports LACP. And what that means is you're kind of telling the switch to handle that function and figuring out the best pathing on here. So we hit Next. Which ones are we going to include? I don't know why it wants to check this one. You'll probably get some unexpected results if you bond mixed devices in there. I don't know if it'll work. It's a maybe, but I know it's not generally recommended to bond together mixed groupings of interfaces because like I said, it can be challenging. But these two are plugged in. So these are ones we're going to bond. They're two one gig connections. We're going to give them a specific IP address of 233 because I don't want them to grab anything to HTTP. I want specifically these to have this address. And set us to fault gateway, sure. And we're checking that because this will be the only gateway out. So we're saying, hey, any of the other services on here, make sure this is your default. That only really applies if you're using other interfaces, but we're not. Then we hit Apply. Services on each bonded interface, for example, firewall rules, et cetera, will be disabled. Once bond is created, do you want to proceed? We're going to say yes. Now, Synology takes a little while to do this. And also, I didn't configure the Unify switch. And we're plugged into, and we jump over here. Look at the devices and it's plugged in here. There's where it's plugged in at. It's going to have some problems. And those problems are we turned on LACP on the device, but not inside of here. So to get this working, we're just going to go over here, Profile Overrides, Aggregate, we only can aggregate two of them. So from 10 to 11 and hit Apply, it'll push this provision to the switch. Now, if we hadn't done this, or if the switch was not configured properly, unexpected results, because the Synology is trying to talk LACP, and if the switch doesn't talk LACP, well, like I said, unexpected results may or may not be able to get to it. Now, one nice thing about the Synology is it is smart enough to figure out what IP address I typed in. So I typed in that 3.233. We go over here, and now I'm logged in and we have the go to network interfaces, and it says Bond. And that's it. That's as simple as it is to have the Bond working in Synology. It's a fairly straightforward step. Now, what happens if one of these links goes down? Yeah, not really a big deal. Gonna head and just unplug one of the links that was going into it. This goes down. That's the other advantage of LACP. It is dynamic and will dynamically reconfigure this system. So I'll refresh the page here in a second. Take a second to notice this and update that we've lost one of our links. So go back to control panel, network, network interfaces, and you can see one of them is down. But not really a big deal, but we did lose the bandwidth temporarily. And all we have to do to fix that is, well plug it back in and away it goes. So pretty straightforward to do on Synology. They have probably one of the easier setups for it. Now there is a little jump in the video because there is a pause when you create and edit these bonds where over time it may take a second. And I see that because on some of the Synologies I had tested this on, or we've actually just configured and set up for clients, we do notice sometimes it takes almost a minute to configure. This one being a faster model seems to do a little bit quicker than those. So warning that if you think it's broken or something's going wrong, at least wait a minute before to do it. Maybe if you have a really old Synology, maybe it takes two or three minutes. So patience is not easy, but if you're a little patient, I haven't had any of these fail or have problems when I've configured them. But just a word to warning on that. Now one thing I am curious about is what would happen if we took these together with the 10G? And seeing as I know it works right here, I'm gonna see what we can break by doing that. And hopefully I don't have to reload everything. So we're gonna actually add one more to the port aggregation. And we're also gonna delete the bond. So I'll walk you through that. So let's delete it. Are you sure you want to continue? Yep. And we're gonna try building the bond with one more, which is going to be kind of interesting there. So I'm also going to, well, I'm just gonna change the unify switch right now to aggregate to port 12. So we'll hit apply on that. But I'm not sure if it's gonna get an IP address. So unless I move it to a different port in the short term. So let's give it a second to go through the applying and we'll just skip ahead till it's done doing that. All right, now to get this to work just a little bit of what happened. When we did this, we have ports 10 through 12 bonded together. I had to move it over to port eight because when it's back in single mode unless I reconfigure the unify switch not to have LACP turned on, well it won't hand out addresses. So we're gonna go back over here and we're gonna create the bond again. Also of note is when I disabled the bond it still pulled that static IP address back over that I had set. So let's go ahead and create it. We're gonna try and create it with a mixed in here including a 10 gig. So let's go ahead and create bond. We'll create this type here and we're gonna put all of them in there and let me see if Zalgy lets me do this. Next, 192.168.3.233. So we're gonna reuse the same IP address. 3.1, set us to follow great way, apply. Services on each bond interface and et cetera will be done. Yes, applying network settings but now I gotta make sure I plug it back in to the proper ports that are all configured all three ports configured for LACP so it will build the aggregation properly. I am go through it, supplying network settings and see if it works. Can we mix the 10 gig with the one gig ports? Don't know, we're finding out in real time here. I did not do this ahead of time for this particular video of any testing. So we're gonna find out in just a second here. And the answer is yes, I can take the 10 gig port which is LAN one, the two one gig ports and combine them together. Now, as I stated this switch is all one gig so that's why they're only connecting at one gig even though this analogy does have a 10 gig port. And let's test something real quick here. So we're gonna go ahead and ping this. And what I'm gonna do is move this over so we can see the links going up and down. Well, let's put this towards the top over here. Shrink it down a little bit or move this over. Here we go. So I make sure we can see everything as they're going up and down. So it's pinging away and we're going to start yanking out the one gig connections. So that removed the LAN three. We're still able to ping this removed and we're still able to ping. So I've now only on the 10 gig. So it is able to, it isn't just saying it's there. It's actually putting traffic over it and we'll plug these back in. And now we're gonna unplug the LAN one which is the 10 gig only connected at one and we just merged over those. And this is also showing how the fault tolerance works and how quickly dynamic, the dynamicness of LACP. So it quickly reconfigures and goes, all right, let's renegotiate this and with the connections we have and keep the data working so you're able to move ports around and do things like that. We'll plug them back in and you can see network status change right here. As soon as it recognizes that one's back into the pool we have the full amount of all of them and all the while, I know there's gonna be some packet loss probably, yeah, 4% packet loss. So a couple of packets to get dropped when we were switching because if you pull the link that is active and that goes back to what I said early in the beginning where when you're dealing with streams ICMP or ping is a single stream. So there's a stream going from my laptop to those particular IP addresses. And if I happen to pull the link that the stream had chose to go down or LACP had decided was the connection for that one it will drop. If I pull a connection it wasn't on, it doesn't drop. It keeps negotiating that and figuring out the most efficient way based on usage. So that's all you gotta do to have a Synology setup. It's pretty straightforward. It does have that caveat. If you want to use LACP that you do have to have a switch that supports it but it's easily supported on Unify. And that's about it. Thanks. Oh, and look forward to the review. I'm looking forward to reviewing this and maybe you are too. This has been pretty fun to play with. The review demo is still coming on this particular device. Thanks. And thank you for making it to the end of the video. If you liked this video, please give it a thumbs up. If you'd like to see more content from the channel hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon if you'd like YouTube to notify you when new videos come out. 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