I have a customer who is familiar with NIC bonding/teaming on a variety
of OSes, and is asking to enhance our offering.
So I took a look at the Linux Channel Bonding at
http://bonding.sourceforge.net/ (specifically bonding.txt from the
download) and what is available for Windows at
http://bizsupport.austin.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c01415139/c01415139.pdf
Both describe a number of different options.
Link aggregation requires switch support, and most switches only support
it within the switch. IPMP can be used either in probe-based failure
detection to check paths to a router or other device, or link-based
failure detection to only fail over on a link failure.
Initially, I thought that IPMP link-based failure detection does not
offer similar active-passive as the two listed above do, but it does.
What other options do people really use, that are missing from link
aggregation and IPMP?
Per bonding.txt [1] Linux Channel Bonding has:
balance-rr or 0
active-backup or 1
balance-xor or 2
broadcast or 3
802.3ad or 4
balance-tlb or 5
balance-alb or 6
There is a lot of similarity in the Windows one.
The customer seems to also want traffic based failover, getting what
probe-based failure detection sort of does, without the need for test
addresses. I am hoping to get a little more clarity on their
requirements, instead of just hearing that we don't have all the feature
that others have even if they may not be used.
Understanding of your preferred configurations used and why might help here.
Thanks in advance.
Steffen
PS. At a customer today, one person does have experience with the Linux
active-backup and IPMP, and he stated that the former fails over
immediately while IPMP (Solaris 10) as a small, noticeable delay, as
seen by checking for character echo in an ssh session. The IPMP
configuration is link-based failure detection. I wonder if that is
because the in.mpath does get involved, instead of this being fully in
the kernel. Off-hand I am not sure if the IPMP re-architecture moves
that into the kernel.
[1]
http://sourceforge.net/projects/bonding/files/Documentation/12%20November%202007/bonding.txt/download
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