Greetings:
It is pretty easy – however on the switch side you want to
mirror the ports.
This helped us a great deal.
Failing to do this and … it's a pure bugger to say it lightly.
For more information – follow this link: http://sourceforge.net/projects/bonding/
For those of you wondering:
(copied from the net… in tons of places)
Glenn
--à
Bonding is the same as port trunking. When/Why should you
use port trunking / bonding? Anytime you require redundant links, fault
tolerance or load balancing it is wise to use port trunking. If you can – use
a 802.1q VLAN
There are a few bonding modes:
Diverse modes of bonding:
mode=1
(active-backup)
Active-backup policy: Only one slave in the bond is active. A different slave
becomes active if, and only if, the active slave fails. The bond's MAC address
is externally visible on only one port (network adapter) to avoid confusing the
switch. This mode provides fault tolerance. The primary option affects the
behavior of this mode.
mode=2
(balance-xor)
XOR policy: Transmit based on [(source MAC address XOR'd with destination MAC
address) modulo slave count]. This selects the same slave for each destination
MAC address. This mode provides load balancing and fault tolerance.
mode=3
(broadcast)
Broadcast policy: transmits everything on all slave interfaces. This mode
provides fault tolerance.
mode=4
(802.3ad)
IEEE 802.3ad Dynamic link aggregation. Creates aggregation groups that share
the same speed and duplex settings. Utilizes all slaves in the active
aggregator according to the 802.3ad specification.
- Prerequisites:
- Ethtool support in the base drivers for
retrieving the speed and duplex of each slave.
- A switch that supports IEEE 802.3ad Dynamic
link aggregation. Most switches will require some type of configuration
to enable 802.3ad mode.
mode=5
(balance-tlb)
Adaptive transmit load balancing: channel bonding that does not require any
special switch support. The outgoing traffic is distributed according to the
current load (computed relative to the speed) on each slave. Incoming traffic
is received by the current slave. If the receiving slave fails, another slave
takes over the MAC address of the failed receiving slave.
- Prerequisite: Ethtool support in the base drivers
for retrieving the speed of each slave.
mode=6
(balance-alb)
Adaptive load balancing: includes balance-tlb plus receive load balancing (rlb)
for IPV4 traffic, and does not require any special switch support. The receive
load balancing is achieved by ARP negotiation. The bonding driver intercepts
the ARP Replies sent by the local system on their way out and overwrites the
source hardware address with the unique hardware address of one of the slaves
in the bond such that different peers use different hardware addresses for the
server.
Also you can use multiple bond interface but for that you must load the bonding
module as many as you need.
I am planning to implement Ethernet bonding at my
university. Does anyone have any experience with this? What are some problems
you faced? Is it worth the hassle? Did you have to configure anything on the
switch side? Did you do anything special with your switch such as MAC address
modifications?
TIA