Teaming Proliant DL380 G3 NICS

[Simon_119]

Can anyone confirm whether it is possible to
team 2 NICs on a Proliant DL380 G3
to a pair of Cisco WS-X5224 Ports on a
CAT5500 that AREN'T capable of Port Channel ?

Put another way, does it work if we do nothing to the switch ?

I'm not in a position to test this out so would be very grateful.

[Bill Wood_3]

Yes it is possible. Please see the following section of bonding.txt:

2) HA on two or more switches (or a single switch without trunking support)

Example number 2 describes the config that your are interested in setting up.

http://lxr.linux.no/source/Documentation/networking/bonding.txt?v=2.4.22

[Simon_119]

Thanks for your quick answer but these ports
are not capable of etherchannel or trunking, which is a problem I think.

Rgds

[Bill Wood_3]

Please refer to line 875 in the bonding.txt file

Example 2: Using multiple ethernet cards connected to a switch to configure NIC failover (switch is not required to support trunking).

[Mark Travis]

"I'm not in a position to test this out so would be very grateful."

Then later...

"Oops...some dude on the internet said it ought to have worked..."

:-)

This is the sort of thing you absolutely need to test. A bad driver version can do stuff like shut off a NIC until the system itself is power-cycled in the event of an interface outage. I've seen that in testing.

Yeah.

I assume you can't test it because the environment tolerates zero risk or downtime. This is the sort of thing that if not implemented right can cause more downtime than it prevents.

[Simon_119]

Yes that's right, "it must work or we'll nail you but sorry we can't give you a box to test. When will you be ready ?"

Hmmmm.