I have just ordered my first FreeNAS box, and can't wait to tweak it. The system has dual gigabit NICs, however, none of my switches support 802.3ad (link aggregation), so I believe I cannot enable link aggregation (apart from failover, which does not increase bandwidth). Correct me if I am wrong. I also don't have the budget to upgrade my switches right now, but I'm hoping to configure my NAS such that, when under the heaviest load from many clients, it will be able to serve up more than the single gigabit link theoretical limit.
Given my situation, I would like to just use the two ethernet ports as two independent network interfaces with two different IPs, both of which share the exact same ZFS datasets over SMB/CIFS and NFS. I would then manually configure some client PCs to connect to IP 1, and others to IP 2, and then in specific situations, I could theoretically get up to double the bandwidth.
Is this sort of configuration possible? Is it easy to configure? Any pitfalls with my plan?
Given my situation, I would like to just use the two ethernet ports as two independent network interfaces with two different IPs, both of which share the exact same ZFS datasets over SMB/CIFS and NFS. I would then manually configure some client PCs to connect to IP 1, and others to IP 2, and then in specific situations, I could theoretically get up to double the bandwidth.
Is this sort of configuration possible? Is it easy to configure? Any pitfalls with my plan?