Unifi/QNAP Link Aggregation

This is an excerpt from my blog, full instructions can be found in the post: https://www.delight.run/2021/06/27/unifi-and-qnap-link-aggregation/

I was recently asked a question about port channels. I had no clue what a port a channel was, and being curious, I looked it up. From Cisco’s own documentation:

Port channels aggregate multiple physical interfaces into one logical interface to provide higher bandwidth, load balancing, and link redundancy.

Now link aggregation is something I was familiar with, so it really is just another name for it. You may also hear it called trunking. This is a little confusing to me as port trunking is more typically considered VLAN trunking (allows frames to carry VLAN tags between switches). To avoid confusion, some other names you may see outside of link aggregation: trunking, bundling, bonding, channeling, or teaming.

My initial familiarity with link aggregation comes from setting up my QNAP NAS to utilize both of it’s interfaces on my network. In my case, this doesn’t create any benefit if a single client is downloading or uploading to the NAS, but it does essentially double the bandwidth if a second client is. This is very useful if I am working on my computer and also streaming to my PLEX server.

Setting up link aggregation requires changes to both your switch and the device that will be utilizing it. In my case, this means making changes to my Unifi switch and my QNAP NAS. Let’s walk through both of those changes.