NIC bonding active failover mix

[Tim Nelson]

Read a number of posts but needed something more specific.

In HPUX APA I can create two aggregates/channel groups and then assign one group to be LAN_MONITOR failover for the other.

Can I do the same with linux bonding ?

The reason for the failover groups is that I have two cisco 2490 switches and cannot aggregate over both. With the method above I get increased bandwidth as well as failover if one switch were to fail.

Thanks in advance,
Tim

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom Tim,

Linux bonding has a number of modes.

You can with enough cards, create bonded groups. The monitor function is not really there, you will have to write a script for that.

In /etc/modprobe.conf you can choose bonding mode. The documentation is a little hard to read, but there are several choices for mode, one of which might meet your needs.

SEP

[Tim Nelson]

Thanks SEP.

Leaning towards mode 4 but I need to see what my network group has to say about it.. i believe the biggest issue with two switches is a spanning tree loop that can be created ( might be way off here)

0 â Sets a round-robin policy for fault tolerance and load balancing. Transmissions are received
and sent out sequentially on each bonded slave interface beginning with the first one available.
1 â Sets an active-backup policy for fault tolerance. Transmissions are received and sent out via
the first available bonded slave interface. Another bonded slave interface is only used if the active
bonded slave interface fails.
2 â Sets an XOR (exclusive-or) policy for fault tolerance and load balancing. Using this method,
the interface matches up the incoming request's MAC address with the MAC address for one of the
slave NICs. Once this link is established, transmissions are sent out sequentially beginning with the
first available interface.
3 â Sets a broadcast policy for fault tolerance. All transmissions are sent on all slave interfaces.
4 â Sets an IEEE 802.3ad dynamic link aggregation policy. Creates aggregation groups that share
the same speed and duplex settings. Transmits and receives on all slaves in the active aggregator.
Requires a switch that is 802.3ad compliant.
5 â Sets a Transmit Load Balancing (TLB) policy for fault tolerance and load balancing. The
outgoing traffic is distributed according to the current load on each slave interface. Incoming traffic is
received by the current slave. If the receiving slave fails, another slave takes over the MAC address
of the failed slave.
6 â Sets an Active Load Balancing (ALB) policy for fault tolerance and load balancing. Includes
transmit and receive load balancing for IPV4 traffic. Receive load balancing is achieved through
ARP negotiation.