Teaming NICS

[jsnetman]

Never done it before but we are getting a bottleneck on one of our servers, we have 4 broadcom NetXtreme II per server and thought about teaming them.

 

I have a very basic questions on how to do.

 

Do all the nics need an IP address and subnet before I team, or because its creating a virtual NIC I just need the one IP address on one NIC ?

[pete]

Do all the nics need an IP address and subnet before I team, or because its creating a virtual NIC I just need the one IP address on one NIC ?

 

Just one ip for the resulting virtual nic.

[jsnetman]

Just one ip for the resulting virtual nic

 

so presently one of my nics has an IP, are you saying I should remove this before doing the team. And the re-enter it on the virtual nic ?

[Guest Guest]

windows yeah?

 

No just do it. The bonding software isnt amazing but its straight forward enough. You do need to decide which type of bonding you are going to do though; LACP (802.3ad) is by far the best but the connecting switch needs to support it.

 

This is for linux but the explanations of how the different types works is the same. (There may be types that arnt supported in windows, cant remember off the top of my head)

 

balance-rr or 0

 

Round-robin policy: Transmit packets in sequential

order from the first available slave through the

last. This mode provides load balancing and fault

tolerance.

 

active-backup or 1

 

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.

 

In bonding version 2.6.2 or later, when a failover

occurs in active-backup mode, bonding will issue one

or more gratuitous ARPs on the newly active slave.

One gratutious ARP is issued for the bonding master

interface and each VLAN interfaces configured above

it, provided that the interface has at least one IP

address configured. Gratuitous ARPs issued for VLAN

interfaces are tagged with the appropriate VLAN id.

 

This mode provides fault tolerance. The primary

option, documented below, affects the behavior of this

mode.

 

balance-xor or 2

 

XOR policy: Transmit based on the selected transmit

hash policy. The default policy is a simple [(source

MAC address XOR'd with destination MAC address) modulo

slave count]. Alternate transmit policies may be

selected via the xmit_hash_policy option, described

below.

 

This mode provides load balancing and fault tolerance.

 

broadcast or 3

 

Broadcast policy: transmits everything on all slave

interfaces. This mode provides fault tolerance.

 

802.3ad or 4

 

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.

 

Slave selection for outgoing traffic is done according

to the transmit hash policy, which may be changed from

the default simple XOR policy via the xmit_hash_policy

option, documented below. Note that not all transmit

policies may be 802.3ad compliant, particularly in

regards to the packet mis-ordering requirements of

section 43.2.4 of the 802.3ad standard. Differing

peer implementations will have varying tolerances for

noncompliance.

 

Prerequisites:

 

1. Ethtool support in the base drivers for retrieving

the speed and duplex of each slave.

 

2. A switch that supports IEEE 802.3ad Dynamic link

aggregation.

 

Most switches will require some type of configuration

to enable 802.3ad mode.

http://www.cyberciti.biz/howto/question/static/linux-ethernet-bonding-driver-howto.php

Edited February 11, 2010 by Guest