No. It may even be better in that a switch's support for balancing may be [usually is] limited. e.g. if it supports only L2/MAC or L3 hashing, you couldn't saturate the combined links. Even L3+L4 hashing would require multiple TCP streams to saturate the links, and that's not guaranteed. Most switches don't like to do round robin balancing as it requires state to be maintained. YMMV of course depending on your gear. Sent from myPhone.
On Sep 9, 2024, at 4:35 AM, Roger Oberholtzer <roger.oberholtzer@gmail.com> wrote:
If one bonds a number of NIC, is it a requirement that they be connected to the network via a switch? Say that you connect two computers to each other, with 4 NIC on one computer directly connected to 4 NIC on the other. On each these are bonded (called a Team on Windows).
I know that if you do use a switch, it must support Static Link Aggregation. But is a switch required to make this work at all?
-- Roger Oberholtzer