fail-over and load balancing on Network cards

[Burhan Koni]

hi all,

i have four network cards on one server, i know that tru64 supports load balancing on a group of network cards (NetLag), and also supports fail-over for balanced network cards (netrain)....

how could i make:
-load balancing with the same IP ?
-fail-over with the same IP also ?

thanX in advance

[Michael Schulte zur Sur]

Hi,

I assume, you have 5.1B. If so, then read this:
http://h30097.www3.hp.com/docs/base_doc/DOCUMENTATION/V51B_HTML/ARH9CDTE/TITLE.HTM
http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=382907

If not, tell me.

greetings,

Michael

[Burhan Koni]

Hi
I have is HP9000 servers (HP-UX) 11 and 11i
regards

[Hoefnix]

If you want to do this on a HP9000 system you need special software and a license to use it.
HP call this APA.(Auto-Port Aggregation)
You can configure your NIC's for loadbalancing or failover functionality.
You need a codeword from HP to be able to install it. The product itself is on the Applications CD's (i think the first CDROM) you've got these togheter with the install media of HP-UX.

Hope this will help, for more info search on this forum on APA and you got allot of information on it.

Regards,

Peter Geluk

[Michael Schulte zur Sur]

Oops,

thought, you put it in the wrong forum.
Read this:
http://docs.hp.com/hpux/pdf/J4240-90018.pdf
http://docs.hp.com/hpux/pdf/J4240-90016.pdf
http://docs.hp.com/hpux/pdf/J4240-90017.pdf

greetings,

Michael

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Hi,

Both fail-over and load balancing cannot be done without additional softwares.

1. Serviceguard will help fail-over the network on a standby card in case it detects "hardware interface down state" on the network card. But it cannot load balance the network cards.

2. APA is the solution. You can aggregate multiple cards as a single card. This way you will get loadbalancing and failover.

Both the products come with a price.

Look at the following document for details on APA

http://docs.hp.com/hpux/onlinedocs/J4240-90016/J4240-90016.html

-Sri

[Hoefnix]

Sri,

You are right, you can not use both at one time with APA.
To make the story complete, you can configure APA in failover mode. So if you don't need port-aggregation, you can also use APA to have a failover interface(it's not common but possible)
I admit you wil use APA preferably for loadbalancing.

Regards,

Peter

[Steven E. Protter]

Auto Port Agregation, a pay for add in product will give you this functionality on multi port cards.

It may also give you this functionality on multiple individual cards.

SEP

[Alzhy]

In its truest sense, there is no load balancing on HPUX environments provided by any solution. For Failover -- yes, you can write your own or use the AutoPort Aggregation software (US $1600). With the APA software, you have the option to run it in "trunking" or "aggregation" mode - which basically creates large network pipes - ie. if you've 4 x 1 Gbit NIC's trunked, then you'll have theorethically a 4Gbit/s device. If one member fails, then you'll be left with the bandwidth of whatever is left. This is most useful in applications that require very large network bandwidths, ie. Filers (NetApps, Auspex, etc..) where reference configurations for Databases stored on NFS mounted storage are already existing...

For Failover use, APA also does it nicely and is called the "manual" or LAN failover mode... Did you know that HP's implementation only require 1 IP address compared with other implementations?