Ethernet bondig

[Edoardo Causarano]

Hi there,

I have a question for you. I've done some FC SAN configurations and understood the benefits of multipathing so now our critical servers are redundantly connected to minimize storage failure probability.

Can I do the same with network? I'd like to bond a couple eth devs and attach them to redundant switches (not stacked) so in case one link fails, the other one keeps connectivity (throw in some load balancing as a bonus!)

As far as I can understand, and as the network guys put it, it can't be done. In fact, eth bondig replicates the mac address on all the participating interfaces confusing the hell out of the eth routing protocols. Still, I keep wondering about this issue... after all,  having to rush out to the datacentre because a nic, cable or switch gave up the ghost while everything else is duplicated is irritating (and inelegant).

So, would the switches (Cisco, in our case) choke is the same MAC was detected on two different ports of two different units? Would they go in broadcast mode, flooding the VLAN?

All this on Linux servers... Of course ;-)
e
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