Configuring aggregated network interfaces

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Set up aggregated network interfaces for high availability, increased throughput, or both.

About this task

This page is not available in the LMI when the appliance runs in a container environment.

This capability is commonly called bonding in Linux environments. Use it to place multiple real network interfaces behind a virtual network interface. This feature is useful for physical appliances only, and not for virtual appliances. For virtual appliances, you can use the hypervisor to set up the NIC bonding and present a single virtual interface to the virtual appliances.

The appliance supports the following bonding modes:

Table 1. Bonding modes
Mode Name Description
0 balance-rr Round-robin policy: Transmits packets in sequential order from the first available slave through the last.
1 active-backup Active-backup policy: Only 1 slave in the bond is active. A different slave becomes active if, and only if, the active slave fails.
2 balance-xor XOR policy: Transmits based on the selected transmit hash policy.
3 broadcast Broadcast policy: Transmits everything on all slave interfaces.
4 802.3ad IEEE 802.3ad Dynamic link aggregation: Creates aggregation groups that share speed and duplex settings. Uses all slaves in the active aggregator according to the 802.3ad specification.
5 balance-tlb Adaptive transmit load balancing: Channel bonding that does not require any special switch support.
6 balance-alb Adaptive load balancing: Includes balance-tlb plus receive load balancing (rlb) for IPV4 traffic. It does not require any special switch support. The receive load balancing is achieved by ARP negotiation.

Configuration options for these bonding modes are available through the appliance advanced tuning parameters. If set, the parameters apply to all bonding interfaces. For more details, see Managing advanced tuning parameters.

The bonding (enslave) order of the slaves is not configurable. The network device that is configured as the primary bonding device uses its underlying physical device as the first bonded slave.

Note: Expect interruption to any existing network traffic on the involved interfaces when the configuration changes are committed.

Procedure

  1. From the top menu, select System > Network Settings > Interfaces.
  2. Edit the appliance interface to be replaced by the virtual bonding interface behind which the aggregation of interfaces is placed. The physical network interface that is normally represented by this configuration is the first interface aggregated behind the bonding virtual interface.
    1. Select the interface and then click Edit.
    2. For this interface, set the Bonding Mode to something other than None or Slave.
      For example, 802.3ad.
      Note: Some bonding modes, such as 802.3ad, require equivalent support from the network switch to which they are attached.
    3. Set the IP addresses of the interface, if not already set. This interface configuration defines the IP address of the aggregation.
    4. Save the configuration.
  3. Edit each additional interface to be added to the aggregation. For each slave:
    1. Set the Bonding Mode to Slave.
      Note: If you have an existing bonding configuration on an interface, you must set the bonding configuration back to None and deploy the change before you can set the interface to be a slave. That is, the Slave option does not appear when you list the available modes on an interface with an existing bonding configuration. You must first clear the existing bonding configuration by setting the bonding mode to None. After deploying the change, you can see the Slave option in the list.
    2. For the Bonded To field, select the initial interface that was configured in previous steps.
    3. Save the configuration.
  4. Commit the changes.