How to get BeeGFS client to utilize both ports on dual-port network adapter fully

[d79ima]

My Setup
I am running a BeeGFS v8 client on a relatively old machine.
It's a Dell T3500 Precision workstation with a dual-port 10Gbpbs Intel X540-AT2 NIC. I have 10 such machines.
Currently I have both ports on the NIC bonded using balance-xor mode and layer3+4 hashing policy.
The client is connecting to a server machine over an Ethernet switch.
The server machine is exposing a single BeeGFS target on a very fast RAID-6 volume, from a single IP address.
On the client machine I am running my own program that does file writes and reads to /mnt/beegfs folder, using 32MB buffer,15 threads, and direct IO.
I am expecting ~2GB/s throughput on both writes and reads, as the limit should be the network speed, the server RAID-6 is very fast can do 20GB/s reads and 16GB/s writes.

Question #1:
Is it possible to break the bond on the dual-port NIC, assign 2 different IP addresses to each port that are on the same subnet as the server management IP, and configure beegfs-client to utilize both ports in a load-balanced way. Basically, I would like to mount two different local folders to the same server target, such that each folder mount is using a different NIC port, then run two instances of my program concurrently to achieve 2GB/s aggregate throughput?

Question #2:
Across my 10 Dell client machines I am seeing vary wide range of throughput. Only 1 out of 10 machines is able to get close to the expected 2GB/s read and write performance. The others range between 1-1.8 GB/s. Another strange behavior I see is some client machines can attain 2GB/s write speed, but read speed is far lower, closer to 1GB/s. Any suggestions anyone can offer as to what might be causing such a variance in behavior? These Dell machines are fairly similar. All using the same NIC, some have different class CPU with fewer cores and less RAM. Core count ranges between 8-12. RAM varies between 8-12GB.
The most unexpected is if a client machine can write fast, why can't it read just as fast?