Multiple NIC Guidance

Multiple NIC (Network Interface Card) Guidance

The OSG and WLCG recommendation is to deploy two flavors of perfSONAR measurement nodes: 1) a latency instance which continuously measures packet delay and lost and 2) a bandwidth instance measuring the achievable bandwidth. That implies sites must purchase, deploy and maintain two systems. Why can't we just run both latency and bandwidth services on a single instance? The problem is that running both latency and bandwidth services on a single node / single NIC may cause interence between the various measurements and introduce "false-positive" indications of network problems.

Many sites would prefer not to have to deploy two servers for cost, space and power reasons. Fortunately the perfSONAR developers have provided a way to install both latency and bandwidth measurements services on a single node, as long as it has at least two NICs (one per 'flavor' of measurement) and sufficient processing and memory. See manage-dual-xface for details on configuring this.