Network Bonding � Quick Reference (RHEL)

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January 10, 201412 yr

Bonding is a feature that can be enabled by the Linux kernel, to allow system administrators to combine two or more network interface to form a single, logical “bonded” interface, for redundancy or increased throughput purpose.

We can configure Linux bonding in 7 different modes. The behavior of the bonded interfaces depends upon the mode.

Below are the available bonding modes

Balance-rr (mode 0)
- This mode transmits packets in a sequential order from the first available slave through the last. If two real interfaces are slaves in the bond and two packets arrive destined out of the bonded interface the first will be transmitted on the first slave and the second frame will be transmitted on the second slave. The third packet will be sent on the first and so on. This provides load balancing and fault tolerance.
Active-backup (mode 1)
- This mode places one of the interfaces into a backup state and will only make it active if the link is lost by the active interface. Only one slave in the bond is active at an instance of time. A different slave becomes active only when the active slave fails. This mode provides fault tolerance.
Balance-xor (mode 2)
- Transmits based on XOR formula. (Source MAC address is XOR’d with destination MAC address) modula slave count. This selects the same slave for each destination MAC address and provides load balancing and fault tolerance.
Broadcast (mode 3)
- This mode transmits everything on all slave interfaces. This mode is least used (only for specific purpose) and provides only fault tolerance.
802.3ad (mode 4)
- This mode is known as Dynamic Link Aggregation mode. It creates aggregation groups that share the same speed and duplex settings. This mode requires a switch that supports IEEE
Balance-tlb (mode 5)
- This is called as Adaptive transmit load balancing. The outgoing traffic is distributed according to the current load and queue on each slave interface. Incoming traffic is received by the current slave.
Balance-alb (mode 6)
- This is Adaptive load balancing mode. This includes balance-tlb + receive load balancing (rlb) for IPV4 traffic. The receive load balancing is achieved by ARP negotiation. The bonding driver intercepts the ARP Replies sent by the server on their way out and overwrites the src hw address with the unique hw address of one of the slaves in the bond such that different clients use different hw addresses for the server.

It's a good idea to see what network interfaces are active on the box you are working on first.


$ netstat -i


$ /sbin/ifconfig | grep "Link encap" | awk '{ print $1 '}

OR you can see what all interfaces are on the server


$ /sbin/ifconfig -a | grep "Link encap" | awk '{ print $1 '}

ALSO, look at the active interfaces and take note of the static settings which you are going to want to make on the bond interface. Example:


$ cat /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

METHOD #1

Step 1.

Create the file ifcfg-bond0 with the IP address, netmask and gateway. Shown below is my test bonding config file.


$ cat /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bond0 

DEVICE=bond0 
IPADDR=192.168.1.12 
NETMASK=255.255.255.0 
GATEWAY=192.168.1.1 
USERCTL=no 
BOOTPROTO=none 
ONBOOT=yes

Step 2.

Modify eth0, eth1 and eth2 configuration as shown below. Comment out, or remove the ip address, netmask, gateway and hardware address from each one of these files, since settings should only come from the ifcfg-bond0 file above. Make sure you add the MASTER and SLAVE configuration in these files.


$ cat /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 

DEVICE=eth0 
BOOTPROTO=none 
ONBOOT=yes 
# Settings for Bond 
MASTER=bond0 
SLAVE=yes


$ cat /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1 

DEVICE=eth1 
BOOTPROTO=none  
ONBOOT=yes 
USERCTL=no 
# Settings for bonding 
MASTER=bond0 
SLAVE=yes


$ cat /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth2 

DEVICE=eth2 
BOOTPROTO=none 
ONBOOT=yes 
MASTER=bond0 
SLAVE=yes

Step 3.

Set the parameters for bond0 bonding kernel module. Select the network bonding mode based on you need, documented at. The modes are

mode=0 (Balance Round Robin)
mode=1 (Active backup)
mode=2 (Balance XOR)
mode=3 (Broadcast)
mode=4 (802.3ad)
mode=5 (Balance TLB)
mode=6 (Balance ALB)

Validate bonding module is installed by running


modinfo bonding

Add the following lines to /etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf


# bonding commands 
alias bond0 bonding 
options bond0 mode=1 miimon=100

Step 4.

Load the bond driver module from the command prompt.


$ modprobe bonding

Step 5.

Restart the network, or restart the computer.


$ service network restart # Or restart computer

When the machine boots up check the proc settings.


$ cat /proc/net/bonding/bond0 
Ethernet Channel Bonding Driver: v3.0.2 (March 23, 2006) 


Bonding Mode: adaptive load balancing 
Primary Slave: None 
Currently Active Slave: eth2 
MII Status: up 
MII Polling Interval (ms): 100 
Up Delay (ms): 0 
Down Delay (ms): 0 


Slave Interface: eth2 
MII Status: up 
Link Failure Count: 0 
Permanent HW addr: 00:13:72:80: 62:f0

Look at ifconfig -a and check that your bond0 interface is active. You are done!

To verify whether the failover bonding works..

Do an ifdown eth0 and check cat /proc/net/bonding/bond0 and check the “Current Active slave”.
Do a continuous ping to the bond0 ipaddress from a different machine and do a ifdown the active interface. The ping should not break.
When interfaces are part of the bond0 they will all show the same mac-address, if troubleshooting network connection you can remove an interface from the bond to help troubleshoot by issuing ifenslave -d bond0 eth0

METHOD #2

Configuring a bonding Channel between eth0 and eth1 using the default mode i.e. Mode-0 (balance-rr)

Network manager should not be running on the system, as NIM doesn’t support bonding. So please stop and disable the networkmanager service.
1. ```
# service NetworkManager stop 
# chkconfig NetworkManager off
```
Bonding module should be configured and loaded. To enable bonding module, create a bonding.conf file as below. Note : you can add multiple entries to create multiple bonding channels like bond0, bond1, bond2…etc
1. ```
# cat > /etc/modprobe.d/bonding.conf
alia bond0 bonding
options bond0 mode=1 miimon=100 
```

Create a configuration file for the bonding channel i.e. bond0, as below


# cat /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bond0


DEVICE=bond0
IPADDR=192.168.50.111
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
USERCTL=no
BOOTPROTO=none
ONBOOT=yes
BONDING_OPTS=”mode=0 miimon=100″

Create configuration files for all the interfaces i.e. eth0 and eth1, which are participating in the bonding channel


# cat > /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0


DEVICE=eth0
BOOTPROTO=none
HWADDR=aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff
ONBOOT=yes
MASTER=bond0
SLAVE=yes
USERCTL=no


# cat > /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1


DEVICE=eth1
BOOTPROTO=none
HWADDR=yy:xx:zz:aa:bb:cc
ONBOOT=yes
MASTER=bond0
SLAVE=yes
USERCTL=no

Activating Bonding Channel


a. With out rebooting
# modprobe bonding
# service network restart

b. with reboot
# reboot

Verify that Bonding channel is active, by using the commands


# cat /proc/net/bonding/bond0 
Ethernet Channel Bonding Driver: v3.0.2 (Nov 25, 2012) 


Bonding Mode: adaptive load balancing 
Primary Slave: None 
Currently Active Slave: eth0 
MII Status: up 
MII Polling Interval (ms): 100 
Up Delay (ms): 0 
Down Delay (ms): 0 


Slave Interface: eth0
MII Status: up 
Link Failure Count: 0 
Permanent HW addr: aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff

Configurable Bonding Parameters

max_bonds : specifies the number of bonding devices that can be configured on single bonding driver.

xmit_hash_policy : Slecect the transmit has policy to use for slave selection in balance-xor and 802.3d modevice. Possible values , layer2 (default) , larer2+3 or layer3+4

arp_interval : Specifies the ARP link monitoring frequency in milli seconds

arp_ip_target : Specifies the IP addresses to use as ARP monitoring peers when arp_interval is > 0. Multiple IP addresses must be seperated by comma. At least one IP addres must be given for ARP monitoring to work. Max. no. of target IPs are 16.

arp_validate : Specifies Whether or not ARP probes and replies should be validated in the active-backup mode. This causes the ARP monitor to examine the incoming ARP requests and replies, and only consider a slave to be up if it is receiving the appropriate ARP traffic. Possible values

none(0) – default value
active(1) – validate only the active slave
backup(2) – validate only the backup slave
all(3) – validate all slaves
miimon : Specifies the MII link monitoring frequency in milliseconds. A value of 0 disables the MII link monitroing. A value of 100 is recommended.

updelay : specifies the time, in milliseconds, to wait before disabling a slave after a link recovery has been detected.

downdelay : specifies the time, in milliseconds, to wait before disabling a slava after a link failure has been detected.

use_carrier : specifies whether or not miimon shoudl use MII/ETHTOO “ioctls for value of 0 ” or ” netif_carrier_ok() for value 1 ( default value)” functions to determine the link status.

FAQ to Troubleshoot Network Bonding

1. /proc/net/bond0/bonding display the network interface card’s link is up when the cable is unplugged within a bonding environment. why ?

Bonding driver uses “use_carrier” with default value of 1 ( i.e. to use netif_carrier_ok() function), to identify the link status. Just incase if the bonding driver doesn’t support netif_carrier_ok() function, it cannot determine the link status properly. As a workaround we can set use_carrier to value 0 ( i.e. to use MII/ETHTOOL ioctl method) to determine the link status, as mentioned below


# cat /etc/modprobe.conf
alias bond0 bonding
options bonding mode=1 miimon=100 use_carrier=0

if you are using mode-1 , we can also set the arp_interval and arp_ip_target to determine the link status as given below


# cat /etc/modprobe.conf
alias bond0 bonding
options bonding mode=1 miimon=100 arp_interval=200 arp_ip_target=192.168.0.1,192.168.0.2

2. Although the Bonding configured in balance-rr / mode-0 ( round-robin policy), outgoing network traffic doesn’t appear to go through all interfaces (RHEL5)

Possible cause could be that Bonded interfaces is predominantly communicating with a low number of IP address (for example, only NAS NFS traffic is used on the interface). To make sure that traffic was getting distributed to all available slave interfaces change the xmit_hash_policy value as given below:

Option 1: modify the /etc/modprobe.conf to add the xmit_hash_policy value


#vi /etc/modprobe.conf
:::::: output truncated::::
options bond0 mode=0 miimon=100 xmit_hash_policy=1
:::::: output truncated::::

Option 2: Modify /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bondX and add/modify the following entry


#vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bondX
BONDING_OPTS=”mode=0 miimon=100 xmit_hash_policy=1″

Then restart the bonding interface using


# ifdown bondX
# ifup bondX

For more reference to use there values you can check, in your linux box : /usr/share/doc/kernel-doc-2.6.18/Documentation/networking/bonding.txt

>>>> 3. How to Gracefully Break the Bonded Network Interface?

In Sample Configuration is we have bond0 configure for two interface name eth0 and eht1, and bond running configuration looks as

# cat /proc/net/bonding/bond0

Ethernet Channel Bonding Driver: v3.4.0 Bonding Mode: load balancing (round-robin)

MII Status: up

MII Polling Interval (ms): 100

Up Delay (ms): 0

Down Delay (ms): 0

Slave Interface: eth0

MII Status: up

Link Failure Count: 0

Permanent HW addr: 53:44:00:43:91:04

Slave Interface: eth1

MII Status: up

Link Failure Count: 0

Permanent HW addr: 52:33:00:6d:0e:70

The process to break the bonded interface is :

a. Online remove one slave network interface which will be assigned with a new IP address from the bonding device. In this example, we are going to remove the eth1 from bond0. Execute the following command as root:

# ifenslave -d bond0 eth1

# echo -eth1 > /sys/class/net/bond0/bonding/slaves

After issue the command above , You will see the eth1 device has been remove from bond0# cat /proc/net/bonding/bond0

Ethernet Channel Bonding Driver: v3.4.0

Bonding Mode: load balancing (round-robin)

MII Status: up

MII Polling Interval (ms): 100

Up Delay (ms): 0

Down Delay (ms): 0

Slave Interface: eth0

MII Status: up

Link Failure Count: 0

Permanent HW addr: 53:44:00:43:91:04

b. Create a new network configuration for eth1 via graphic tool or text tool and then using following command to start eth1 again. Make sure the physical link has been changed correctly to match the new network configuration of eth1.

# ifup eth1

During the above 2 steps, the network of bond0 will work fine without any break up.

c. Create the same network configuration as bond0 for eth0

– just copy the content of /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bondX to /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0, except the interface name and HW MAC address.

d. Remove the eth0 from bond0, destory the bond0 device and start eth0 immediately.

Please note this disruptive operation, The network of bond0/eth0 will break shortly during this step.# ifenslave -d bond0 eth0; ifdown bond0; ifup eth0

# cat /proc/net/bonding/bond0

Ethernet Channel Bonding Driver: v3.4.0

Bonding Mode: load balancing (round-robin)

MII Status: down

MII Polling Interval (ms): 100

Up Delay (ms): 0

Down Delay (ms): 0

now ifconfig will show the configuration for only eth0 and eth1, no bonding interface appears.

e. Remove all bonding setting of bond0 in /etc/modprobe.conf and remove the ifcfg-bond0 in /etc/sysconfig/network-script directory. Then issue following command to remove the bond0 device from memory completely.

# echo -bond0 > /sys/class/net/bonding_masters

>>>> 4. The interface eth0 configured with the multiple virtual interfaces like eth0:1 , eht0:2 and eth0:3. When we disable the virtual interface eth0:0 , the other two interfaces also getting disabled.

In RHEL5, the lowest numbered virtual interface was treated as “primary” interface, and remaining all as secondary interfaces as “secondary” . If we disable primary interface , it will by default disable all the secondary interface.

And to avoid this default behavior, we should set a kernel parameter ”net.ipv4.conf.all.promote_secondaries” to value “1″, so that the secondary interfaces will be promoted as primary, in case of primary down.

There are two ways to set this parameter:

Method-1

# Vi /etc/sysctl.conf

net.ipv4.conf.all.promote_secondaries = 1

# sysctl -p

Method-2

echo “1″ > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/eth1/promote_secondaries

>>>> 5. Difference between arp monitoring and MII monitoring

ARP monitoring periodically sends an arp packet to the designated hosts. When the reply does not come back, then the bonding device considers the network on that specific device is down.

MII monitoring periodically monitors the information provided by MII (Media Independent Interface). When the interface of the driver detects the network failure, the bonding device considers the network on that specific device is down.

MII is a driver-dependent function. It cannot detect network failure if it occurred beyond the nearest switch, because the monitoring covers the link from the device to the nearest connected switch. Whenever emitting excessive network packets is accepted, it is safe to use ARP monitoring.

METHOD #3

Creating NIC Bond interface on CentOS 6.4

[root@hosangit ~]# vim /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bond0

and insert the following fairly simple to understand lines.

DEVICE=bond0

IPADDR=192.168.15.10

NETMASK=255.255.255.0

GATEWAY=192.168.15.45

USERCTL=no

BOOTPROTO=none

ONBOOT=yes

DNS1=192.168.15.45

Now remember, we need to have atleast two NIC present on the server to be part of the bond. This could be three Gig Interfaces if you've them available in order to achieve a 3Gbps link.

Edit the Interfaces going to be part of this bond.

[root@hosangit ~]# vim /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

DEVICE=eth0

TYPE=Ethernet

BOOTPROTO=none

ONBOOT=yes

MASTER=bond0

SLAVE=yes

[root@hosangit ~]# vim /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1

DEVICE=eth1

TYPE=Ethernet

BOOTPROTO=none

ONBOOT=yes

USERCTL=no

MASTER=bond0

SLAVE=yes

Now its time to setup some parameters for the 007-Bond Interface.

[root@hosangit ~]# vim /etc/modprobe.d/bonding.conf

Write the lines below in the file,save and exit.

alias bond0 bonding

options bond0 mode=1 miimon=100 arp_interval=100 arp_ip_target=192.168.15.45,192.168.15.5,192.168.15.20

The above configuration is used by the "bonding" Linux kernel module. The options are important here:

mode=1 : Set the bonding method to Active backup.

miimon=100 : Set the MII link monitoring frequency to 100 milliseconds. This determines how often the link state of each slave is inspected for link failures.

arp_interval=100 : Set the ARP link monitoring frequency to 100 milliseconds (You can setup any keeping your network equipment in mind). This is important to be there.

arp_ip_target=192.168.15.45, 192.168.15.5 : Use the 192.168.15.5 (router ip) and 192.168.15.45 IP addresses to use as ARP monitoring peers when arp_interval is > 0. This is used determine the health of the link to the targets. Multiple IP addresses must be separated by a comma. At least one IP address must be given (usually I set it to router IP) for ARP monitoring to function. The maximum number of targets that can be specified is 16.

Thats all. Just restart the networking service and if you've any ethernet interface configured then you might need to shutdown that interface and start the network service again.

[root@hosangit ~]# /etc/init.d/network restart

January 10, 201412 yr

Author

Most popular distro kernels ship with the bonding driver already available as a module and the ifenslave user level control program installed and ready for use. If your distro does not, or you have need to compile bonding from source (e.g., configuring and installing a mainline kernel from kernel.org), you'll need to perform the following steps:

1.1 Configure and build the kernel with bonding

The current version of the bonding driver is available in the drivers/net/bonding subdirectory of the most recent kernel source (which is available on http://kernel.org). Most users "rolling their own" will want to use the most recent kernel from kernel.org.

Configure kernel with "make menuconfig" (or "make xconfig" or "make config"), then select "Bonding driver support" in the "Network device support" section. It is recommended that you configure the driver as module since it is currently the only way to pass parameters to the driver or configure more than one bonding device.

Build and install the new kernel and modules, then continue below to install ifenslave.

1.2 Install ifenslave Control Utility

The ifenslave user level control program is included in the kernel source tree, in the file Documentation/networking/ifenslave.c. It is generally recommended that you use the ifenslave that corresponds to the kernel that you are using (either from the same source tree or supplied with the distro), however, ifenslave executables from older kernels should function (but features newer than the ifenslave release are not supported). Running an ifenslave that is newer than the kernel is not supported, and may or may not work.

To install ifenslave, do the following:

# gcc -Wall -O -I/usr/src/linux/include ifenslave.c -o ifenslave # cp ifenslave /sbin/ifenslave

If your kernel source is not in "/usr/src/linux," then replace "/usr/src/linux/include" in the above with the location of your kernel source include directory.

You may wish to back up any existing /sbin/ifenslave, or, for testing or informal use, tag the ifenslave to the kernel version (e.g., name the ifenslave executable /sbin/ifenslave-2.6.10).

IMPORTANT NOTE:

If you omit the "-I" or specify an incorrect directory, you may end up with an ifenslave that is incompatible with the kernel you're trying to build it for. Some distros (e.g., Red Hat from 7.1 onwards) do not have /usr/include/linux symbolically linked to the default kernel source include directory.

2. Bonding Driver Options

Options for the bonding driver are supplied as parameters to the bonding module at load time. They may be given as command line arguments to the insmod or modprobe command, but are usually specified in either the /etc/modules.conf or /etc/modprobe.conf configuration file, or in a distro-specific configuration file (some of which are detailed in the next section).

The available bonding driver parameters are listed below. If a parameter is not specified the default value is used. When initially configuring a bond, it is recommended "tail -f /var/log/messages" be run in a separate window to watch for bonding driver error messages.

It is critical that either the miimon or arp_interval and arp_ip_target parameters be specified, otherwise serious network degradation will occur during link failures. Very few devices do not support at least miimon, so there is really no reason not to use it.

Options with textual values will accept either the text name or, for backwards compatibility, the option value. E.g., "mode=802.3ad" and "mode=4" set the same mode.

The parameters are as follows:

arp_interval

Specifies the ARP link monitoring frequency in milliseconds.

If ARP monitoring is used in an etherchannel compatible mode

(modes 0 and 2), the switch should be configured in a mode

that evenly distributes packets across all links. If the

switch is configured to distribute the packets in an XOR

fashion, all replies from the ARP targets will be received on

the same link which could cause the other team members to

fail. ARP monitoring should not be used in conjunction with

miimon. A value of 0 disables ARP monitoring. The default

value is 0.

arp_ip_target

Specifies the IP addresses to use as ARP monitoring peers when

arp_interval is > 0. These are the targets of the ARP request

sent to determine the health of the link to the targets.

Specify these values in ddd.ddd.ddd.ddd format. Multiple IP

addresses must be separated by a comma. At least one IP

address must be given for ARP monitoring to function. The

maximum number of targets that can be specified is 16. The

default value is no IP addresses.

downdelay

Specifies the time, in milliseconds, to wait before disabling

a slave after a link failure has been detected. This option

is only valid for the miimon link monitor. The downdelay

value should be a multiple of the miimon value; if not, it

will be rounded down to the nearest multiple. The default

value is 0.

lacp_rate

Option specifying the rate in which we'll ask our link partner

to transmit LACPDU packets in 802.3ad mode. Possible values

are:

slow or 0

Request partner to transmit LACPDUs every 30 seconds

fast or 1

Request partner to transmit LACPDUs every 1 second

The default is slow.

max_bonds

Specifies the number of bonding devices to create for this

instance of the bonding driver. E.g., if max_bonds is 3, and

the bonding driver is not already loaded, then bond0, bond1

and bond2 will be created. The default value is 1.

miimon

Specifies the MII link monitoring frequency in milliseconds.

This determines how often the link state of each slave is

inspected for link failures. A value of zero disables MII

link monitoring. A value of 100 is a good starting point.

The use_carrier option, below, affects how the link state is

determined. See the High Availability section for additional

information. The default value is 0.

mode

Specifies one of the bonding policies. The default is

balance-rr (round robin). Possible values are:

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.

balance-tlb or 5

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.

balance-alb or 6

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.

Receive traffic from connections created by the server

is also balanced. When the local system sends an ARP

Request the bonding driver copies and saves the peer's

IP information from the ARP packet. When the ARP

Reply arrives from the peer, its hardware address is

retrieved and the bonding driver initiates an ARP

reply to this peer assigning it to one of the slaves

in the bond. A problematic outcome of using ARP

negotiation for balancing is that each time that an

ARP request is broadcast it uses the hardware address

of the bond. Hence, peers learn the hardware address

of the bond and the balancing of receive traffic

collapses to the current slave. This is handled by

sending updates (ARP Replies) to all the peers with

their individually assigned hardware address such that

the traffic is redistributed. Receive traffic is also

redistributed when a new slave is added to the bond

and when an inactive slave is re-activated. The

receive load is distributed sequentially (round robin)

among the group of highest speed slaves in the bond.

When a link is reconnected or a new slave joins the

bond the receive traffic is redistributed among all

active slaves in the bond by initiating ARP Replies

with the selected mac address to each of the

clients. The updelay parameter (detailed below) must

be set to a value equal or greater than the switch's

forwarding delay so that the ARP Replies sent to the

peers will not be blocked by the switch.

Prerequisites:

1. Ethtool support in the base drivers for retrieving

the speed of each slave.

2. Base driver support for setting the hardware

address of a device while it is open. This is

required so that there will always be one slave in the

team using the bond hardware address (the

curr_active_slave) while having a unique hardware

address for each slave in the bond. If the

curr_active_slave fails its hardware address is

swapped with the new curr_active_slave that was

chosen.

primary

A string (eth0, eth2, etc) specifying which slave is the

primary device. The specified device will always be the

active slave while it is available. Only when the primary is

off-line will alternate devices be used. This is useful when

one slave is preferred over another, e.g., when one slave has

higher throughput than another.

The primary option is only valid for active-backup mode.

updelay

Specifies the time, in milliseconds, to wait before enabling a

slave after a link recovery has been detected. This option is

only valid for the miimon link monitor. The updelay value

should be a multiple of the miimon value; if not, it will be

rounded down to the nearest multiple. The default value is 0.

use_carrier

Specifies whether or not miimon should use MII or ETHTOOL

ioctls vs. netif_carrier_ok() to determine the link

status. The MII or ETHTOOL ioctls are less efficient and

utilize a deprecated calling sequence within the kernel. The

netif_carrier_ok() relies on the device driver to maintain its

state with netif_carrier_on/off; at this writing, most, but

not all, device drivers support this facility.

If bonding insists that the link is up when it should not be,

it may be that your network device driver does not support

netif_carrier_on/off. The default state for netif_carrier is

"carrier on," so if a driver does not support netif_carrier,

it will appear as if the link is always up. In this case,

setting use_carrier to 0 will cause bonding to revert to the

MII / ETHTOOL ioctl method to determine the link state.

A value of 1 enables the use of netif_carrier_ok(), a value of

0 will use the deprecated MII / ETHTOOL ioctls. The default

value is 1.

xmit_hash_policy

Selects the transmit hash policy to use for slave selection in

balance-xor and 802.3ad modes. Possible values are:

layer2

Uses XOR of hardware MAC addresses to generate the

hash. The formula is

(source MAC XOR destination MAC) modulo slave count

This algorithm will place all traffic to a particular

network peer on the same slave.

This algorithm is 802.3ad compliant.

layer3+4

This policy uses upper layer protocol information,

when available, to generate the hash. This allows for

traffic to a particular network peer to span multiple

slaves, although a single connection will not span

multiple slaves.

The formula for unfragmented TCP and UDP packets is

((source port XOR dest port) XOR

((source IP XOR dest IP) AND 0xffff)

modulo slave count

For fragmented TCP or UDP packets and all other IP

protocol traffic, the source and destination port

information is omitted. For non-IP traffic, the

formula is the same as for the layer2 transmit hash

policy.

This policy is intended to mimic the behavior of

certain switches, notably Cisco switches with PFC2 as

well as some Foundry and IBM products.

This algorithm is not fully 802.3ad compliant. A

single TCP or UDP conversation containing both

fragmented and unfragmented packets will see packets

striped across two interfaces. This may result in out

of order delivery. Most traffic types will not meet

this criteria, as TCP rarely fragments traffic, and

most UDP traffic is not involved in extended

conversations. Other implementations of 802.3ad may

or may not tolerate this noncompliance.

The default value is layer2. This option was added in bonding

version 2.6.3. In earlier versions of bonding, this parameter does not exist, and the layer2 policy is the only policy.

3. Configuring Bonding Devices

There are, essentially, two methods for configuring bonding: with support from the distro's network initialization scripts, and without. Distros generally use one of two packages for the network initialization scripts: initscripts or sysconfig. Recent versions of these packages have support for bonding, while older versions do not.

We will first describe the options for configuring bonding for distros using versions of initscripts and sysconfig with full or partial support for bonding, then provide information on enabling bonding without support from the network initialization scripts (i.e., older versions of initscripts or sysconfig).

If you're unsure whether your distro uses sysconfig or initscripts, or don't know if it's new enough, have no fear. Determining this is fairly straightforward.

First, issue the command:

$ rpm -qf /sbin/ifup

It will respond with a line of text starting with either "initscripts" or "sysconfig," followed by some numbers. This is the package that provides your network initialization scripts.

Next, to determine if your installation supports bonding, issue the command:

$ grep ifenslave /sbin/ifup

If this returns any matches, then your initscripts or sysconfig has support for bonding.

3.1 Configuration with sysconfig support

This section applies to distros using a version of sysconfig with bonding support, for example, SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9.

SuSE SLES 9's networking configuration system does support bonding, however, at this writing, the YaST system configuration frontend does not provide any means to work with bonding devices. Bonding devices can be managed by hand, however, as follows.

First, if they have not already been configured, configure the slave devices. On SLES 9, this is most easily done by running the yast2 sysconfig configuration utility. The goal is for to create an ifcfg-id file for each slave device. The simplest way to accomplish this is to configure the devices for DHCP (this is only to get the file ifcfg-id file created; see below for some issues with DHCP). The name of the configuration file for each device will be of the form:

ifcfg-id-xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx

Where the "xx" portion will be replaced with the digits from the device's permanent MAC address.

Once the set of ifcfg-id-xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx files has been created, it is necessary to edit the configuration files for the slave devices (the MAC addresses correspond to those of the slave devices). Before editing, the file will contain multiple lines, and will look something like this:

BOOTPROTO='dhcp'

STARTMODE='on'

USERCTL='no'

UNIQUE='XNzu.WeZGOGF+4wE'

_nm_name='bus-pci-0001:61:01.0'

Change the BOOTPROTO and STARTMODE lines to the following:

BOOTPROTO='none'

STARTMODE='off'

Do not alter the UNIQUE or _nm_name lines. Remove any other lines (USERCTL, etc).

Once the ifcfg-id-xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx files have been modified, it's time to create the configuration file for the bonding device itself. This file is named ifcfg-bondX, where X is the number of the bonding device to create, starting at 0. The first such file is ifcfg-bond0, the second is ifcfg-bond1, and so on. The sysconfig network configuration system will correctly start multiple instances of bonding.

The contents of the ifcfg-bondX file is as follows:

BOOTPROTO="static"

BROADCAST="10.0.2.255"

IPADDR="10.0.2.10"

NETMASK="255.255.0.0"

NETWORK="10.0.2.0"

REMOTE_IPADDR=""

STARTMODE="onboot"

BONDING_MASTER="yes"

BONDING_MODULE_OPTS="mode=active-backup miimon=100" BONDING_SLAVE0="eth0"

BONDING_SLAVE1="bus-pci-0000:06:08.1"

Replace the sample BROADCAST, IPADDR, NETMASK and NETWORK values with the appropriate values for your network.

The STARTMODE specifies when the device is brought online. The possible values are:

onboot: The device is started at boot time. If you're not

sure, this is probably what you want.

manual: The device is started only when ifup is called

manually. Bonding devices may be configured this

way if you do not wish them to start automatically

at boot for some reason.

hotplug: The device is started by a hotplug event. This is not

a valid choice for a bonding device.

off or ignore: The device configuration is ignored.

The line BONDING_MASTER='yes' indicates that the device is a bonding master device. The only useful value is "yes."

The contents of BONDING_MODULE_OPTS are supplied to the instance of the bonding module for this device. Specify the options for the bonding mode, link monitoring, and so on here. Do not include the max_bonds bonding parameter; this will confuse the configuration system if you have multiple bonding devices.

Finally, supply one BONDING_SLAVEn="slave device" for each slave. where "n" is an increasing value, one for each slave. The "slave device" is either an interface name, e.g., "eth0", or a device specifier for the network device. The interface name is easier to find, but the ethN names are subject to change at boot time if, e.g., a device early in the sequence has failed. The device specifiers (bus-pci-0000:06:08.1 in the example above) specify the physical network device, and will not change unless the device's bus location changes (for example, it is moved from one PCI slot to another). The example above uses one of each type for demonstration purposes; most configurations will choose one or the other for all slave devices.

When all configuration files have been modified or created, networking must be restarted for the configuration changes to take effect. This can be accomplished via the following:

# /etc/init.d/network restart

Note that the network control script (/sbin/ifdown) will remove the bonding module as part of the network shutdown processing, so it is not necessary to remove the module by hand if, e.g., the module parameters have changed.

Also, at this writing, YaST/YaST2 will not manage bonding devices (they do not show bonding interfaces on its list of network devices). It is necessary to edit the configuration file by hand to change the bonding configuration.

Additional general options and details of the ifcfg file format can be found in an example ifcfg template file:

/etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg.template

Note that the template does not document the various BONDING_ settings described above, but does describe many of the other options.

3.1.1 Using DHCP with sysconfig

Under sysconfig, configuring a device with BOOTPROTO='dhcp' will cause it to query DHCP for its IP address information. At this writing, this does not function for bonding devices; the scripts attempt to obtain the device address from DHCP prior to adding any of the slave devices. Without active slaves, the DHCP requests are not sent to the network.

3.1.2 Configuring Multiple Bonds with sysconfig

The sysconfig network initialization system is capable of handling multiple bonding devices. All that is necessary is for each bonding instance to have an appropriately configured ifcfg-bondX file (as described above). Do not specify the "max_bonds" parameter to any instance of bonding, as this will confuse sysconfig. If you require multiple bonding devices with identical parameters, create multiple ifcfg-bondX files.

Because the sysconfig scripts supply the bonding module options in the ifcfg-bondX file, it is not necessary to add them to the system /etc/modules.conf or /etc/modprobe.conf configuration file.

3.2 Configuration with initscripts support

This section applies to distros using a version of initscripts with bonding support, for example, Red Hat Linux 9 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 3 or 4. On these systems, the network initialization scripts have some knowledge of bonding, and can be configured to control bonding devices.

These distros will not automatically load the network adapter driver unless the ethX device is configured with an IP address. Because of this constraint, users must manually configure a network-script file for all physical adapters that will be members of a bondX link. Network script files are located in the directory:

/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts

The file name must be prefixed with "ifcfg-eth" and suffixed with the adapter's physical adapter number. For example, the script for eth0 would be named /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0. Place the following text in the file:

DEVICE=eth0

USERCTL=no

ONBOOT=yes

MASTER=bond0

SLAVE=yes

BOOTPROTO=none

The DEVICE= line will be different for every ethX device and must correspond with the name of the file, i.e., ifcfg-eth1 must have a device line of DEVICE=eth1. The setting of the MASTER= line will also depend on the final bonding interface name chosen for your bond. As with other network devices, these typically start at 0, and go up one for each device, i.e., the first bonding instance is bond0, the second is bond1, and so on.

Next, create a bond network script. The file name for this script will be /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bondX where X is the number of the bond. For bond0 the file is named "ifcfg-bond0", for bond1 it is named "ifcfg-bond1", and so on. Within that file, place the following text:

DEVICE=bond0

IPADDR=192.168.1.1

NETMASK=255.255.255.0

NETWORK=192.168.1.0

BROADCAST=192.168.1.255

ONBOOT=yes

BOOTPROTO=none

USERCTL=no

Be sure to change the networking specific lines (IPADDR, NETMASK, NETWORK and BROADCAST) to match your network configuration.

Finally, it is necessary to edit /etc/modules.conf (or /etc/modprobe.conf, depending upon your distro) to load the bonding module with your desired options when the bond0 interface is brought up. The following lines in /etc/modules.conf (or modprobe.conf) will load the bonding module, and select its options:

alias bond0 bonding

options bond0 mode=balance-alb miimon=100

Replace the sample parameters with the appropriate set of options for your configuration.

Finally run "/etc/rc.d/init.d/network restart" as root. This will restart the networking subsystem and your bond link should be now up and running.

Using DHCP with initscripts

Recent versions of initscripts (the version supplied with Fedora Core 3 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 is reported to work) do have support for assigning IP information to bonding devices via DHCP.

To configure bonding for DHCP, configure it as described above, except replace the line "BOOTPROTO=none" with "BOOTPROTO=dhcp" and add a line consisting of "TYPE=Bonding". Note that the TYPE value is case sensitive.

3.2.2 Configuring Multiple Bonds with initscripts

At this writing, the initscripts package does not directly support loading the bonding driver multiple times, so the process for doing so is the same as described in the "Configuring Multiple Bonds Manually" section, below.

NOTE: It has been observed that some Red Hat supplied kernels are apparently unable to rename modules at load time (the "-o bond1" part). Attempts to pass that option to modprobe will produce an "Operation not permitted" error. This has been reported on some Fedora Core kernels, and has been seen on RHEL 4 as well. On kernels exhibiting this problem, it will be impossible to configure multiple bonds with differing parameters.

3.3 Configuring Bonding Manually

This section applies to distros whose network initialization scripts (the sysconfig or initscripts package) do not have specific knowledge of bonding. One such distro is SuSE Linux Enterprise Server version 8.

The general method for these systems is to place the bonding module parameters into /etc/modules.conf or /etc/modprobe.conf (as appropriate for the installed distro), then add modprobe and/or ifenslave commands to the system's global init script. The name of the global init script differs; for sysconfig, it is /etc/init.d/boot.local and for initscripts it is /etc/rc.d/rc.local.

For example, if you wanted to make a simple bond of two e100 devices (presumed to be eth0 and eth1), and have it persist across reboots, edit the appropriate file (/etc/init.d/boot.local or /etc/rc.d/rc.local), and add the following:

modprobe bonding mode=balance-alb miimon=100 modprobe e100

ifconfig bond0 192.168.1.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 up ifenslave bond0 eth0

ifenslave bond0 eth1

Replace the example bonding module parameters and bond0 network configuration (IP address, netmask, etc) with the appropriate values for your configuration.

Unfortunately, this method will not provide support for the ifup and ifdown scripts on the bond devices. To reload the bonding configuration, it is necessary to run the initialization script, e.g.,

# /etc/init.d/boot.local

# /etc/rc.d/rc.local

It may be desirable in such a case to create a separate script which only initializes the bonding configuration, then call that separate script from within boot.local. This allows for bonding to be enabled without re-running the entire global init script.

To shut down the bonding devices, it is necessary to first mark the bonding device itself as being down, then remove the appropriate device driver modules. For our example above, you can do the following:

# ifconfig bond0 down

# rmmod bonding

# rmmod e100

Again, for convenience, it may be desirable to create a script with these commands.

3.3.1 Configuring Multiple Bonds Manually

This section contains information on configuring multiple bonding devices with differing options for those systems whose network initialization scripts lack support for configuring multiple bonds.

If you require multiple bonding devices, but all with the same options, you may wish to use the "max_bonds" module parameter, documented above.

To create multiple bonding devices with differing options, it is necessary to load the bonding driver multiple times. Note that current versions of the sysconfig network initialization scripts handle this automatically; if your distro uses these scripts, no special action is needed. See the section Configuring Bonding Devices, above, if you're not sure about your network initialization scripts.

To load multiple instances of the module, it is necessary to specify a different name for each instance (the module loading system requires that every loaded module, even multiple instances of the same module, have a unique name). This is accomplished by supplying multiple sets of bonding options in /etc/modprobe.conf, for example:

alias bond0 bonding

options bond0 -o bond0 mode=balance-rr miimon=100

alias bond1 bonding

options bond1 -o bond1 mode=balance-alb miimon=50

will load the bonding module two times. The first instance is named "bond0" and creates the bond0 device in balance-rr mode with an miimon of 100. The second instance is named "bond1" and creates the bond1 device in balance-alb mode with an miimon of 50.

In some circumstances (typically with older distributions), the above does not work, and the second bonding instance never sees its options. In that case, the second options line can be substituted as follows:

install bond1 /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install bonding -o bond1

mode=balance-alb miimon=50

This may be repeated any number of times, specifying a new and unique name in place of bond1 for each subsequent instance.

5. Querying Bonding Configuration

5.1 Bonding Configuration

Each bonding device has a read-only file residing in the /proc/net/bonding directory. The file contents include information about the bonding configuration, options and state of each slave.

For example, the contents of /proc/net/bonding/bond0 after the driver is loaded with parameters of mode=0 and miimon=1000 is generally as follows:

Ethernet Channel Bonding Driver: 2.6.1 (October 29, 2004)

Bonding Mode: load balancing (round-robin)

Currently Active Slave: eth0

MII Status: up

MII Polling Interval (ms): 1000

Up Delay (ms): 0

Down Delay (ms): 0

Slave Interface: eth1

MII Status: up

Link Failure Count: 1

Slave Interface: eth0

MII Status: up

Link Failure Count: 1

The precise format and contents will change depending upon the

bonding configuration, state, and version of the bonding driver.

5.2 Network configuration

The network configuration can be inspected using the ifconfig command. Bonding devices will have the MASTER flag set; Bonding slave devices will have the SLAVE flag set. The ifconfig output does not contain information on which slaves are associated with which masters.

In the example below, the bond0 interface is the master (MASTER) while eth0 and eth1 are slaves (SLAVE). Notice all slaves of bond0 have the same MAC address (HWaddr) as bond0 for all modes except TLB and ALB that require a unique MAC address for each slave.

# /sbin/ifconfig

bond0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:C0:F0:1F:37:B4

inet addr:XXX.XXX.XXX.YYY Bcast:XXX.XXX.XXX.255 Mask:255.255.252.0

UP BROADCAST RUNNING MASTER MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1

RX packets:7224794 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0

TX packets:3286647 errors:1 dropped:0 overruns:1 carrier:0

collisions:0 txqueuelen:0

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:C0:F0:1F:37:B4

inet addr:XXX.XXX.XXX.YYY Bcast:XXX.XXX.XXX.255 Mask:255.255.252.0

UP BROADCAST RUNNING SLAVE MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1

RX packets:3573025 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0

TX packets:1643167 errors:1 dropped:0 overruns:1 carrier:0

collisions:0 txqueuelen:100

Interrupt:10 Base address:0x1080

eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:C0:F0:1F:37:B4

inet addr:XXX.XXX.XXX.YYY Bcast:XXX.XXX.XXX.255 Mask:255.255.252.0

UP BROADCAST RUNNING SLAVE MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1

RX packets:3651769 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0

TX packets:1643480 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0

collisions:0 txqueuelen:100

Interrupt:9 Base address:0x1400

6. Switch Configuration

For this section, "switch" refers to whatever system the bonded devices are directly connected to (i.e., where the other end of the cable plugs into). This may be an actual dedicated switch device, or it may be another regular system (e.g., another computer running Linux),

The active-backup, balance-tlb and balance-alb modes do not require any specific configuration of the switch.

The 802.3ad mode requires that the switch have the appropriate ports configured as an 802.3ad aggregation. The precise method used to configure this varies from switch to switch, but, for example, a Cisco 3550 series switch requires that the appropriate ports first be grouped together in a single etherchannel instance, then that etherchannel is set to mode "lacp" to enable 802.3ad (instead of standard EtherChannel).

The balance-rr, balance-xor and broadcast modes generally require that the switch have the appropriate ports grouped together. The nomenclature for such a group differs between switches, it may be called an "etherchannel" (as in the Cisco example, above), a "trunk group" or some other similar variation. For these modes, each switch will also have its own configuration options for the switch's transmit policy to the bond. Typical choices include XOR of either the MAC or IP addresses. The transmit policy of the two peers does not need to match. For these three modes, the bonding mode really selects a transmit policy for an EtherChannel group; all three will interoperate with another EtherChannel group.

7. 802.1q VLAN Support

It is possible to configure VLAN devices over a bond interface using the 8021q driver. However, only packets coming from the 8021q driver and passing through bonding will be tagged by default. Self generated packets, for example, bonding's learning packets or ARP packets generated by either ALB mode or the ARP monitor mechanism, are tagged internally by bonding itself. As a result, bonding must "learn" the VLAN IDs configured above it, and use those IDs to tag self generated packets.

For reasons of simplicity, and to support the use of adapters that can do VLAN hardware acceleration offloading, the bonding interface declares itself as fully hardware offloading capable, it gets the add_vid/kill_vid notifications to gather the necessary information, and it propagates those actions to the slaves. In case of mixed adapter types, hardware accelerated tagged packets that should go through an adapter that is not offloading capable are "un-accelerated" by the bonding driver so the VLAN tag sits in the regular location.

VLAN interfaces must be added on top of a bonding interface only after enslaving at least one slave. The bonding interface has a hardware address of 00:00:00:00:00:00 until the first slave is added. If the VLAN interface is created prior to the first enslavement, it would pick up the all-zeroes hardware address. Once the first slave is attached to the bond, the bond device itself will pick up the slave's hardware address, which is then available for the VLAN device.

Also, be aware that a similar problem can occur if all slaves are released from a bond that still has one or more VLAN interfaces on top of it. When a new slave is added, the bonding interface will obtain its hardware address from the first slave, which might not match the hardware address of the VLAN interfaces (which was ultimately copied from an earlier slave).

There are two methods to insure that the VLAN device operates with the correct hardware address if all slaves are removed from a bond interface:

Remove all VLAN interfaces then recreate them

Set the bonding interface's hardware address so that it matches the hardware address of the VLAN interfaces.

Note that changing a VLAN interface's HW address would set the underlying device -- i.e. the bonding interface -- to promiscuous mode, which might not be what you want.

8. Link Monitoring

The bonding driver at present supports two schemes for monitoring a slave device's link state: the ARP monitor and the MII monitor.

At the present time, due to implementation restrictions in the bonding driver itself, it is not possible to enable both ARP and MII monitoring simultaneously.

8.1 ARP Monitor Operation

The ARP monitor operates as its name suggests: it sends ARP queries to one or more designated peer systems on the network, and uses the response as an indication that the link is operating. This gives some assurance that traffic is actually flowing to and from one or more peers on the local network.

The ARP monitor relies on the device driver itself to verify that traffic is flowing. In particular, the driver must keep up to date the last receive time, dev->last_rx, and transmit start time, dev->trans_start. If these are not updated by the driver, then the ARP monitor will immediately fail any slaves using that driver, and those slaves will stay down. If networking monitoring (tcpdump, etc) shows the ARP requests and replies on the network, then it may be that your device driver is not updating last_rx and trans_start.

8.2 Configuring Multiple ARP Targets

While ARP monitoring can be done with just one target, it can be useful in a High Availability setup to have several targets to monitor. In the case of just one target, the target itself may go down or have a problem making it unresponsive to ARP requests. Having an additional target (or several) increases the reliability of the ARP monitoring.

Multiple ARP targets must be separated by commas as follows:

# example options for ARP monitoring with three targets alias bond0 bonding

options bond0 arp_interval=60 arp_ip_target=192.168.0.1,192.168.0.3,192.168.0.9

For just a single target the options would resemble:

# example options for ARP monitoring with one target alias bond0 bonding

options bond0 arp_interval=60 arp_ip_target=192.168.0.100

8.3 MII Monitor Operation

The MII monitor monitors only the carrier state of the local network interface. It accomplishes this in one of three ways: by depending upon the device driver to maintain its carrier state, by querying the device's MII registers, or by making an ethtool query to the device.

If the use_carrier module parameter is 1 (the default value), then the MII monitor will rely on the driver for carrier state information (via the netif_carrier subsystem). As explained in the use_carrier parameter information, above, if the MII monitor fails to detect carrier loss on the device (e.g., when the cable is physically disconnected), it may be that the driver does not support netif_carrier.

If use_carrier is 0, then the MII monitor will first query the device's (via ioctl) MII registers and check the link state. If that request fails (not just that it returns carrier down), then the MII monitor will make an ethtool ETHOOL_GLINK request to attempt to obtain the same information. If both methods fail (i.e., the driver either does not support or had some error in processing both the MII register and ethtool requests), then the MII monitor will assume the link is up.

9. Potential Sources of Trouble

9.1 Adventures in Routing

When bonding is configured, it is important that the slave devices not have routes that supercede routes of the master (or, generally, not have routes at all). For example, suppose the bonding device bond0 has two slaves, eth0 and eth1, and the routing table is as follows:

Kernel IP routing table

Destination Gateway Genmask Flags MSS Window irtt Iface

10.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 U 40 0 0 eth0

10.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 U 40 0 0 eth1

10.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 U 40 0 0 bond0

127.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 U 40 0 0 lo

This routing configuration will likely still update the

receive/transmit times in the driver (needed by the ARP monitor), but may bypass the bonding driver (because outgoing traffic to, in this case, another host on network 10 would use eth0 or eth1 before bond0).

The ARP monitor (and ARP itself) may become confused by this configuration, because ARP requests (generated by the ARP monitor) will be sent on one interface (bond0), but the corresponding reply will arrive on a different interface (eth0). This reply looks to ARP as an unsolicited ARP reply (because ARP matches replies on an interface basis), and is discarded. The MII monitor is not affected by the state of the routing table.

The solution here is simply to insure that slaves do not have routes of their own, and if for some reason they must, those routes do not supercede routes of their master. This should generally be the case, but unusual configurations or errant manual or automatic static route additions may cause trouble.

9.2 Ethernet Device Renaming

On systems with network configuration scripts that do not associate physical devices directly with network interface names (so that the same physical device always has the same "ethX" name), it may be necessary to add some special logic to either /etc/modules.conf or /etc/modprobe.conf (depending upon which is installed on the system).

For example, given a modules.conf containing the following:

alias bond0 bonding

options bond0 mode=some-mode miimon=50

alias eth0 tg3

alias eth1 tg3

alias eth2 e1000

alias eth3 e1000

If neither eth0 and eth1 are slaves to bond0, then when the bond0 interface comes up, the devices may end up reordered. This happens because bonding is loaded first, then its slave device's drivers are loaded next. Since no other drivers have been loaded, when the e1000 driver loads, it will receive eth0 and eth1 for its devices, but the bonding configuration tries to enslave eth2 and eth3 (which may later be assigned to the tg3 devices).

Adding the following:

add above bonding e1000 tg3

causes modprobe to load e1000 then tg3, in that order, when bonding is loaded. This command is fully documented in the modules.conf manual page.

On systems utilizing modprobe.conf (or modprobe.conf.local), an equivalent problem can occur. In this case, the following can be added to modprobe.conf (or modprobe.conf.local, as appropriate), as follows (all on one line; it has been split here for clarity):

install bonding /sbin/modprobe tg3; /sbin/modprobe e1000;

/sbin/modprobe --ignore-install bonding

This will, when loading the bonding module, rather than performing the normal action, instead execute the provided command. This command loads the device drivers in the order needed, then calls modprobe with --ignore-install to cause the normal action to then take place. Full documentation on this can be found in the modprobe.conf and modprobe manual pages.

9.3. Painfully Slow Or No Failed Link Detection By Miimon

By default, bonding enables the use_carrier option, which instructs bonding to trust the driver to maintain carrier state.

As discussed in the options section, above, some drivers do not support the netif_carrier_on/_off link state tracking system. With use_carrier enabled, bonding will always see these links as up, regardless of their actual state.

Additionally, other drivers do support netif_carrier, but do not maintain it in real time, e.g., only polling the link state at some fixed interval. In this case, miimon will detect failures, but only after some long period of time has expired. If it appears that miimon is very slow in detecting link failures, try specifying use_carrier=0 to see if that improves the failure detection time. If it does, then it may be that the driver checks the carrier state at a fixed interval, but does not cache the MII register values (so the use_carrier=0 method of querying the registers directly works). If use_carrier=0 does not improve the failover, then the driver may cache the registers, or the problem may be elsewhere.

Also, remember that miimon only checks for the device's carrier state. It has no way to determine the state of devices on or beyond other ports of a switch, or if a switch is refusing to pass traffic while still maintaining carrier on.

10. SNMP agents

If running SNMP agents, the bonding driver should be loaded before any network drivers participating in a bond. This requirement is due to the interface index (ipAdEntIfIndex) being associated to the first interface found with a given IP address. That is, there is only one ipAdEntIfIndex for each IP address. For example, if eth0 and eth1 are slaves of bond0 and the driver for eth0 is loaded before the bonding driver, the interface for the IP address will be associated with the eth0 interface. This configuration is shown below, the IP address 192.168.1.1 has an interface index of 2 which indexes to eth0 in the ifDescr table (ifDescr.2).

interfaces.ifTable.ifEntry.ifDescr.1 = lo

interfaces.ifTable.ifEntry.ifDescr.2 = eth0

interfaces.ifTable.ifEntry.ifDescr.3 = eth1

interfaces.ifTable.ifEntry.ifDescr.4 = eth2

interfaces.ifTable.ifEntry.ifDescr.5 = eth3

interfaces.ifTable.ifEntry.ifDescr.6 = bond0

ip.ipAddrTable.ipAddrEntry.ipAdEntIfIndex.10.10.10.10 = 5

ip.ipAddrTable.ipAddrEntry.ipAdEntIfIndex.192.168.1.1 = 2

ip.ipAddrTable.ipAddrEntry.ipAdEntIfIndex.10.74.20.94 = 4

ip.ipAddrTable.ipAddrEntry.ipAdEntIfIndex.127.0.0.1 = 1

This problem is avoided by loading the bonding driver before

any network drivers participating in a bond. Below is an example of loading the bonding driver first, the IP address 192.168.1.1 is correctly associated with ifDescr.2.

interfaces.ifTable.ifEntry.ifDescr.1 = lo

interfaces.ifTable.ifEntry.ifDescr.2 = bond0

interfaces.ifTable.ifEntry.ifDescr.3 = eth0

interfaces.ifTable.ifEntry.ifDescr.4 = eth1

interfaces.ifTable.ifEntry.ifDescr.5 = eth2

interfaces.ifTable.ifEntry.ifDescr.6 = eth3

ip.ipAddrTable.ipAddrEntry.ipAdEntIfIndex.10.10.10.10 = 6

ip.ipAddrTable.ipAddrEntry.ipAdEntIfIndex.192.168.1.1 = 2

ip.ipAddrTable.ipAddrEntry.ipAdEntIfIndex.10.74.20.94 = 5

ip.ipAddrTable.ipAddrEntry.ipAdEntIfIndex.127.0.0.1 = 1

While some distributions may not report the interface name in

ifDescr, the association between the IP address and IfIndex remains and SNMP functions such as Interface_Scan_Next will report that association.

11. Promiscuous mode

When running network monitoring tools, e.g., tcpdump, it is common to enable promiscuous mode on the device, so that all traffic is seen (instead of seeing only traffic destined for the local host). The bonding driver handles promiscuous mode changes to the bonding master device (e.g., bond0), and propagates the setting to the slave devices.

For the balance-rr, balance-xor, broadcast, and 802.3ad modes, the promiscuous mode setting is propagated to all slaves.

For the active-backup, balance-tlb and balance-alb modes, the promiscuous mode setting is propagated only to the active slave.

For balance-tlb mode, the active slave is the slave currently receiving inbound traffic.

For balance-alb mode, the active slave is the slave used as a "primary." This slave is used for mode-specific control traffic, for sending to peers that are unassigned or if the load is unbalanced.

For the active-backup, balance-tlb and balance-alb modes, when the active slave changes (e.g., due to a link failure), the promiscuous setting will be propagated to the new active slave.

12. Configuring Bonding for High Availability

High Availability refers to configurations that provide maximum network availability by having redundant or backup devices, links or switches between the host and the rest of the world. The goal is to provide the maximum availability of network connectivity (i.e., the network always works), even though other configurations could provide higher throughput.

12.1 High Availability in a Single Switch Topology

If two hosts (or a host and a single switch) are directly connected via multiple physical links, then there is no availability penalty to optimizing for maximum bandwidth. In this case, there is only one switch (or peer), so if it fails, there is no alternative access to fail over to. Additionally, the bonding load balance modes support link monitoring of their members, so if individual links fail, the load will be rebalanced across the remaining devices.

See Section 13, "Configuring Bonding for Maximum Throughput" for information on configuring bonding with one peer device.

12.2 High Availability in a Multiple Switch Topology

With multiple switches, the configuration of bonding and the network changes dramatically. In multiple switch topologies, there is a trade off between network availability and usable bandwidth.

Below is a sample network, configured to maximize the availability of the network:

| |

|port3 port3|

+-----+----+ +-----+----+

| |port2 ISL port2| |

| switch A +--------------------------+ switch B |

| | | |

+-----+----+ +-----++---+

|port1 port1|

| +-------+ |

+-------------+ host1 +---------------+

eth0 +-------+ eth1

In this configuration, there is a link between the two

switches (ISL, or inter switch link), and multiple ports connecting to the outside world ("port3" on each switch). There is no technical reason that this could not be extended to a third switch.

12.2.1 HA Bonding Mode Selection for Multiple Switch Topology

In a topology such as the example above, the active-backup and broadcast modes are the only useful bonding modes when optimizing for availability; the other modes require all links to terminate on the same peer for them to behave rationally.

active-backup: This is generally the preferred mode, particularly if

the switches have an ISL and play together well. If the

network configuration is such that one switch is specifically

a backup switch (e.g., has lower capacity, higher cost, etc),

then the primary option can be used to insure that the

preferred link is always used when it is available.

broadcast: This mode is really a special purpose mode, and is suitable

only for very specific needs. For example, if the two

switches are not connected (no ISL), and the networks beyond

them are totally independent. In this case, if it is

necessary for some specific one-way traffic to reach both

independent networks, then the broadcast mode may be suitable.

12.2.2 HA Link Monitoring Selection for Multiple Switch Topology

The choice of link monitoring ultimately depends upon your switch. If the switch can reliably fail ports in response to other failures, then either the MII or ARP monitors should work. For example, in the above example, if the "port3" link fails at the remote end, the MII monitor has no direct means to detect this. The ARP monitor could be configured with a target at the remote end of port3, thus detecting that failure without switch support.

In general, however, in a multiple switch topology, the ARP monitor can provide a higher level of reliability in detecting end to end connectivity failures (which may be caused by the failure of any individual component to pass traffic for any reason). Additionally, the ARP monitor should be configured with multiple targets (at least one for each switch in the network). This will insure that, regardless of which switch is active, the ARP monitor has a suitable target to query.

13. Configuring Bonding for Maximum Throughput

13.1 Maximizing Throughput in a Single Switch Topology

In a single switch configuration, the best method to maximize throughput depends upon the application and network environment. The various load balancing modes each have strengths and weaknesses in different environments, as detailed below.

For this discussion, we will break down the topologies into two categories. Depending upon the destination of most traffic, we categorize them into either "gatewayed" or "local" configurations.

In a gatewayed configuration, the "switch" is acting primarily as a router, and the majority of traffic passes through this router to other networks. An example would be the following:

+----------+ +----------+

| |eth0 port1| | to other networks

| Host A +---------------------+ router +------------------->

| +---------------------+ | Hosts B and C are out

| |eth1 port2| | here somewhere

+----------+ +----------+

The router may be a dedicated router device, or another host

acting as a gateway. For our discussion, the important point is that the majority of traffic from Host A will pass through the router to some other network before reaching its final destination.

In a gatewayed network configuration, although Host A may communicate with many other systems, all of its traffic will be sent and received via one other peer on the local network, the router.

Note that the case of two systems connected directly via multiple physical links is, for purposes of configuring bonding, the same as a gatewayed configuration. In that case, it happens that all traffic is destined for the "gateway" itself, not some other network beyond the gateway.

In a local configuration, the "switch" is acting primarily as a switch, and the majority of traffic passes through this switch to reach other stations on the same network. An example would be the following:

+----------+ +----------+ +--------+

| |eth0 port1| +-------+ Host B |

| Host A +------------+ switch |port3 +--------+

| +------------+ | +--------+

| |eth1 port2| +------------------+ Host C |

+----------+ +----------+port4 +--------+

Again, the switch may be a dedicated switch device, or another

host acting as a gateway. For our discussion, the important point is that the majority of traffic from Host A is destined for other hosts on the same local network (Hosts B and C in the above example).

In summary, in a gatewayed configuration, traffic to and from the bonded device will be to the same MAC level peer on the network (the gateway itself, i.e., the router), regardless of its final destination. In a local configuration, traffic flows directly to and from the final destinations, thus, each destination (Host B, Host C) will be addressed directly by their individual MAC addresses.

This distinction between a gatewayed and a local network configuration is important because many of the load balancing modes available use the MAC addresses of the local network source and destination to make load balancing decisions. The behavior of each mode is described below.

13.1.1 MT Bonding Mode Selection for Single Switch Topology

This configuration is the easiest to set up and to understand, although you will have to decide which bonding mode best suits your needs. The trade offs for each mode are detailed below:

balance-rr: This mode is the only mode that will permit a single

TCP/IP connection to stripe traffic across multiple

interfaces. It is therefore the only mode that will allow a

single TCP/IP stream to utilize more than one interface's

worth of throughput. This comes at a cost, however: the

striping often results in peer systems receiving packets out

of order, causing TCP/IP's congestion control system to kick

in, often by retransmitting segments.

It is possible to adjust TCP/IP's congestion limits by

altering the net.ipv4.tcp_reordering sysctl parameter. The

usual default value is 3, and the maximum useful value is 127.

For a four interface balance-rr bond, expect that a single

TCP/IP stream will utilize no more than approximately 2.3

interface's worth of throughput, even after adjusting

tcp_reordering.

Note that this out of order delivery occurs when both the

sending and receiving systems are utilizing a multiple

interface bond. Consider a configuration in which a

balance-rr bond feeds into a single higher capacity network

channel (e.g., multiple 100Mb/sec ethernets feeding a single

gigabit ethernet via an etherchannel capable switch). In this

configuration, traffic sent from the multiple 100Mb devices to

a destination connected to the gigabit device will not see

packets out of order. However, traffic sent from the gigabit

device to the multiple 100Mb devices may or may not see

traffic out of order, depending upon the balance policy of the

switch. Many switches do not support any modes that stripe

traffic (instead choosing a port based upon IP or MAC level

addresses); for those devices, traffic flowing from the

gigabit device to the many 100Mb devices will only utilize one

interface.

If you are utilizing protocols other than TCP/IP, UDP for

example, and your application can tolerate out of order

delivery, then this mode can allow for single stream datagram

performance that scales near linearly as interfaces are added

to the bond.

This mode requires the switch to have the appropriate ports

configured for "etherchannel" or "trunking."

active-backup: There is not much advantage in this network topology to

the active-backup mode, as the inactive backup devices are all

connected to the same peer as the primary. In this case, a

load balancing mode (with link monitoring) will provide the

same level of network availability, but with increased

available bandwidth. On the plus side, active-backup mode

does not require any configuration of the switch, so it may

have value if the hardware available does not support any of

the load balance modes.

balance-xor: This mode will limit traffic such that packets destined

for specific peers will always be sent over the same

interface. Since the destination is determined by the MAC

addresses involved, this mode works best in a "local" network

configuration (as described above), with destinations all on

the same local network. This mode is likely to be suboptimal

if all your traffic is passed through a single router (i.e., a

"gatewayed" network configuration, as described above).

As with balance-rr, the switch ports need to be configured for

"etherchannel" or "trunking."

broadcast: Like active-backup, there is not much advantage to this

mode in this type of network topology.

802.3ad: This mode can be a good choice for this type of network

topology. The 802.3ad mode is an IEEE standard, so all peers

that implement 802.3ad should interoperate well. The 802.3ad

protocol includes automatic configuration of the aggregates,

so minimal manual configuration of the switch is needed

(typically only to designate that some set of devices is

available for 802.3ad). The 802.3ad standard also mandates

that frames be delivered in order (within certain limits), so

in general single connections will not see misordering of

packets. The 802.3ad mode does have some drawbacks: the

standard mandates that all devices in the aggregate operate at

the same speed and duplex. Also, as with all bonding load

balance modes other than balance-rr, no single connection will

be able to utilize more than a single interface's worth of

bandwidth.

Additionally, the linux bonding 802.3ad implementation

distributes traffic by peer (using an XOR of MAC addresses),

so in a "gatewayed" configuration, all outgoing traffic will

generally use the same device. Incoming traffic may also end

up on a single device, but that is dependent upon the

balancing policy of the peer's 8023.ad implementation. In a

"local" configuration, traffic will be distributed across the

devices in the bond.

Finally, the 802.3ad mode mandates the use of the MII monitor,

therefore, the ARP monitor is not available in this mode.

balance-tlb: The balance-tlb mode balances outgoing traffic by peer.

Since the balancing is done according to MAC address, in a

"gatewayed" configuration (as described above), this mode will

send all traffic across a single device. However, in a

"local" network configuration, this mode balances multiple

local network peers across devices in a vaguely intelligent

manner (not a simple XOR as in balance-xor or 802.3ad mode),

so that mathematically unlucky MAC addresses (i.e., ones that

XOR to the same value) will not all "bunch up" on a single

interface.

Unlike 802.3ad, interfaces may be of differing speeds, and no

special switch configuration is required. On the down side,

in this mode all incoming traffic arrives over a single

interface, this mode requires certain ethtool support in the

network device driver of the slave interfaces, and the ARP

monitor is not available.

balance-alb: This mode is everything that balance-tlb is, and more.

It has all of the features (and restrictions) of balance-tlb,

and will also balance incoming traffic from local network

peers (as described in the Bonding Module Options section,

above).

The only additional down side to this mode is that the network

device driver must support changing the hardware address while

the device is open.

13.1.2 MT Link Monitoring for Single Switch Topology

The choice of link monitoring may largely depend upon which mode you choose to use. The more advanced load balancing modes do not support the use of the ARP monitor, and are thus restricted to using the MII monitor (which does not provide as high a level of end to end assurance as the ARP monitor).

13.2 Maximum Throughput in a Multiple Switch Topology

Multiple switches may be utilized to optimize for throughput when they are configured in parallel as part of an isolated network between two or more systems, for example:

+-----------+

| Host A |

+-+---+---+-+

| | |

+--------+ | +---------+

| | |

+------+---+ +-----+----+ +-----+----+

+------+---+ +-----+----+ +-----+----+

| | |

+--------+ | +---------+

| | |

+-+---+---+-+

| Host B |

+-----------+

In this configuration, the switches are isolated from one

another. One reason to employ a topology such as this is for an isolated network with many hosts (a cluster configured for high performance, for example), using multiple smaller switches can be more cost effective than a single larger switch, e.g., on a network with 24 hosts, three 24 port switches can be significantly less expensive than a single 72 port switch.

If access beyond the network is required, an individual host can be equipped with an additional network device connected to an external network; this host then additionally acts as a gateway.

13.2.1 MT Bonding Mode Selection for Multiple Switch Topology

In actual practice, the bonding mode typically employed in configurations of this type is balance-rr. Historically, in this network configuration, the usual caveats about out of order packet delivery are mitigated by the use of network adapters that do not do any kind of packet coalescing (via the use of NAPI, or because the device itself does not generate interrupts until some number of packets has arrived). When employed in this fashion, the balance-rr mode allows individual connections between two hosts to effectively utilize greater than one interface's bandwidth.

13.2.2 MT Link Monitoring for Multiple Switch Topology

Again, in actual practice, the MII monitor is most often used in this configuration, as performance is given preference over availability. The ARP monitor will function in this topology, but its advantages over the MII monitor are mitigated by the volume of probes needed as the number of systems involved grows (remember that each host in the network is configured with bonding).

14. Switch Behavior Issues

14.1 Link Establishment and Failover Delays

Some switches exhibit undesirable behavior with regard to the timing of link up and down reporting by the switch.

First, when a link comes up, some switches may indicate that the link is up (carrier available), but not pass traffic over the interface for some period of time. This delay is typically due to some type of autonegotiation or routing protocol, but may also occur during switch initialization (e.g., during recovery after a switch failure). If you find this to be a problem, specify an appropriate value to the updelay bonding module option to delay the use of the relevant interface(s).

Second, some switches may "bounce" the link state one or more times while a link is changing state. This occurs most commonly while the switch is initializing. Again, an appropriate updelay value may help.

Note that when a bonding interface has no active links, the driver will immediately reuse the first link that goes up, even if the updelay parameter has been specified (the updelay is ignored in this case). If there are slave interfaces waiting for the updelay timeout to expire, the interface that first went into that state will be immediately reused. This reduces down time of the network if the value of updelay has been overestimated, and since this occurs only in cases with no connectivity, there is no additional penalty for ignoring the updelay.

In addition to the concerns about switch timings, if your switches take a long time to go into backup mode, it may be desirable to not activate a backup interface immediately after a link goes down. Failover may be delayed via the downdelay bonding module option.

14.2 Duplicated Incoming Packets

It is not uncommon to observe a short burst of duplicated traffic when the bonding device is first used, or after it has been idle for some period of time. This is most easily observed by issuing a "ping" to some other host on the network, and noticing that the output from ping flags duplicates (typically one per slave).

For example, on a bond in active-backup mode with five slaves all connected to one switch, the output may appear as follows:

# ping -n 10.0.4.2

PING 10.0.4.2 (10.0.4.2) from 10.0.3.10 : 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from 10.0.4.2: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=13.7 ms 64 bytes from 10.0.4.2: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=13.8 ms (DUP!) 64 bytes from 10.0.4.2: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=13.8 ms (DUP!) 64 bytes from 10.0.4.2: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=13.8 ms (DUP!) 64 bytes from 10.0.4.2: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=13.8 ms (DUP!) 64 bytes from 10.0.4.2: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.216 ms 64 bytes from 10.0.4.2: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.267 ms 64 bytes from 10.0.4.2: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=0.222 ms

This is not due to an error in the bonding driver, rather, it is a side effect of how many switches update their MAC forwarding tables. Initially, the switch does not associate the MAC address in the packet with a particular switch port, and so it may send the traffic to all ports until its MAC forwarding table is updated. Since the interfaces attached to the bond may occupy multiple ports on a single switch, when the switch (temporarily) floods the traffic to all ports, the bond device receives multiple copies of the same packet (one per slave device).

The duplicated packet behavior is switch dependent, some switches exhibit this, and some do not. On switches that display this behavior, it can be induced by clearing the MAC forwarding table (on most Cisco switches, the privileged command "clear mac address-table dynamic" will accomplish this).

15. Hardware Specific Considerations

This section contains additional information for configuring bonding on specific hardware platforms, or for interfacing bonding with particular switches or other devices.

15.1 IBM BladeCenter

This applies to the JS20 and similar systems.

On the JS20 blades, the bonding driver supports only balance-rr, active-backup, balance-tlb and balance-alb modes. This is largely due to the network topology inside the BladeCenter, detailed below.

JS20 network adapter information

All JS20s come with two Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet ports integrated on the planar (that's "motherboard" in IBM-speak). In the BladeCenter chassis, the eth0 port of all JS20 blades is hard wired to I/O Module #1; similarly, all eth1 ports are wired to I/O Module #2. An add-on Broadcom daughter card can be installed on a JS20 to provide two more Gigabit Ethernet ports. These ports, eth2 and eth3, are wired to I/O Modules 3 and 4, respectively.

Each I/O Module may contain either a switch or a passthrough module (which allows ports to be directly connected to an external switch). Some bonding modes require a specific BladeCenter internal network topology in order to function; these are detailed below.

Additional BladeCenter-specific networking information can be found in two IBM Redbooks (www.ibm.com/redbooks):

"IBM eServer BladeCenter Networking Options" "IBM eServer BladeCenter Layer 2-7 Network Switching"

BladeCenter networking configuration

Because a BladeCenter can be configured in a very large number of ways, this discussion will be confined to describing basic configurations.

Normally, Ethernet Switch Modules (ESMs) are used in I/O modules 1 and 2. In this configuration, the eth0 and eth1 ports of a JS20 will be connected to different internal switches (in the respective I/O modules).

A passthrough module (OPM or CPM, optical or copper, passthrough module) connects the I/O module directly to an external switch. By using PMs in I/O module #1 and #2, the eth0 and eth1 interfaces of a JS20 can be redirected to the outside world and connected to a common external switch.

Depending upon the mix of ESMs and PMs, the network will appear to bonding as either a single switch topology (all PMs) or as a multiple switch topology (one or more ESMs, zero or more PMs). It is also possible to connect ESMs together, resulting in a configuration much like the example in "High Availability in a Multiple Switch Topology," above.

Requirements for specific modes

The balance-rr mode requires the use of passthrough modules for devices in the bond, all connected to an common external switch. That switch must be configured for "etherchannel" or "trunking" on the appropriate ports, as is usual for balance-rr.

The balance-alb and balance-tlb modes will function with either switch modules or passthrough modules (or a mix). The only specific requirement for these modes is that all network interfaces must be able to reach all destinations for traffic sent over the bonding device (i.e., the network must converge at some point outside the BladeCenter).

The active-backup mode has no additional requirements.

Link monitoring issues

When an Ethernet Switch Module is in place, only the ARP monitor will reliably detect link loss to an external switch. This is nothing unusual, but examination of the BladeCenter cabinet would suggest that the "external" network ports are the ethernet ports for the system, when it fact there is a switch between these "external" ports and the devices on the JS20 system itself. The MII monitor is only able to detect link failures between the ESM and the JS20 system.

When a passthrough module is in place, the MII monitor does detect failures to the "external" port, which is then directly connected to the JS20 system.

Other concerns

The Serial Over LAN (SoL) link is established over the primary ethernet (eth0) only, therefore, any loss of link to eth0 will result in losing your SoL connection. It will not fail over with other network traffic, as the SoL system is beyond the control of the bonding driver.

It may be desirable to disable spanning tree on the switch (either the internal Ethernet Switch Module, or an external switch) to avoid fail-over delay issues when using bonding.

16. Frequently Asked Questions

Is it SMP safe?

Yes. The old 2.0.xx channel bonding patch was not SMP safe. The new driver was designed to be SMP safe from the start.

2. What type of cards will work with it?

Any Ethernet type cards (you can even mix cards - a Intel EtherExpress PRO/100 and a 3com 3c905b, for example). For most modes, devices need not be of the same speed.

3. How many bonding devices can I have?

There is no limit.

4. How many slaves can a bonding device have?

This is limited only by the number of network interfaces Linux supports and/or the number of network cards you can place in your system.

5. What happens when a slave link dies?

If link monitoring is enabled, then the failing device will be disabled. The active-backup mode will fail over to a backup link, and other modes will ignore the failed link. The link will continue to be monitored, and should it recover, it will rejoin the bond (in whatever manner is appropriate for the mode). See the sections on High Availability and the documentation for each mode for additional information.

Link monitoring can be enabled via either the miimon or arp_interval parameters (described in the module parameters section, above). In general, miimon monitors the carrier state as sensed by the underlying network device, and the arp monitor (arp_interval) monitors connectivity to another host on the local network.

If no link monitoring is configured, the bonding driver will be unable to detect link failures, and will assume that all links are always available. This will likely result in lost packets, and a resulting degradation of performance. The precise performance loss depends upon the bonding mode and network configuration.

6. Can bonding be used for High Availability?

Yes. See the section on High Availability for details.

7. Which switches/systems does it work with?

The full answer to this depends upon the desired mode.

In the basic balance modes (balance-rr and balance-xor), it works with any system that supports etherchannel (also called trunking). Most managed switches currently available have such support, and many unmanaged switches as well.

The advanced balance modes (balance-tlb and balance-alb) do not have special switch requirements, but do need device drivers that support specific features (described in the appropriate section under module parameters, above).

In 802.3ad mode, it works with with systems that support IEEE 802.3ad Dynamic Link Aggregation. Most managed and many unmanaged switches currently available support 802.3ad.

The active-backup mode should work with any Layer-II switch.

8. Where does a bonding device get its MAC address from?

If not explicitly configured (with ifconfig or ip link), the MAC address of the bonding device is taken from its first slave device. This MAC address is then passed to all following slaves and remains persistent (even if the first slave is removed) until the bonding device is brought down or reconfigured.

If you wish to change the MAC address, you can set it with ifconfig or ip link:

# ifconfig bond0 hw ether 00:11:22:33:44:55

# ip link set bond0 address 66:77:88:99:aa:bb

The MAC address can be also changed by bringing down/up the device and then changing its slaves (or their order):

# ifconfig bond0 down ; modprobe -r bonding # ifconfig bond0 .... up

# ifenslave bond0 eth...

This method will automatically take the address from the next slave that is added.

To restore your slaves' MAC addresses, you need to detach them from the bond (`ifenslave -d bond0 eth0'). The bonding driver will then restore the MAC addresses that the slaves had before they were enslaved.

16. Resources and Links

The latest version of the bonding driver can be found in the latest version of the linux kernel, found on http://kernel.org

The latest version of this document can be found in either the latest kernel source (named Documentation/networking/bonding.txt), or on the bonding sourceforge site:

http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/bonding

Discussions regarding the bonding driver take place primarily on the bonding-devel mailing list, hosted at sourceforge.net. If you have questions or problems, post them to the list. The list address is:

bonding-devel@lists.sourceforge.net

The administrative interface (to subscribe or unsubscribe) can be found at:

https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bonding-devel

Donald Becker's Ethernet Drivers and diag programs may be found at :

http://www.scyld.com/network/

You will also find a lot of information regarding Ethernet, NWay, MII, etc. at www.scyld.com.

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