nixCraft

Hi all,
Let me show my equipments first:

Cisco router 7200 series.
Two 24port cisco catalyst switches model no. WS-C2960G-24TC-L.
Four dell-servers each having RHEL4 installed in it wth two NICs.

Now what I need is a high availablity network.
So I thought of using bonding in each of the Linux servers. In every server, the eth0 will be connected to switchA and eth1 will be connected to switchB.

Now I want some expert suggestion in the topology that I am trying to build.

What would be the requirement or support needed in the switches to support this kind of Bonding?
Would the router be also capable of supporting bonding with two switches, as there are three Gigabit ethernet ports on the router also..


w/regards,
Jayesh

You need put a link between the two switches i.e. inter switch link (ISL).

Let us say you have 2 switches and one Dell server:
1) Switch A
2) Switch B
3) A DellServer with eth0 and eth1 GiG ports

Now connect:
DellServer eth0 => switchA-port1
DellServer eth1 => switchB-port1

Inter switch link:
Switch A-port2 => ISL <= Switch B-port2

For rest of the world you have to use port3 of each switch.

Use active-backup HA bonding mode for this kind of configs.

You can plug router in port3 of any switch or as per your requirement.

If you have more questions, feel free to reply. HTH

__________________
Rocky Jr.
You may have my body & soul, but you will never touch my pride!

If you have knowledge, let others light their candles at it.

Certified to work on HP-UX / Sun Solaris / RedHat

See the configuration RHEL instructions:
http://www.cyberciti.biz/nixcraft/vi...le-network.php

However the line:
options bond0 mode=balance-alb miimon=100

Should be as follows:
options bond0 mode=active-backup miimon=100

balance-alb is adaptive load balancing: includes balance-tlb plus receive load balancing (rlb) for IPV4 traffic, and does not require any special switch support.

Where, active-backup 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.

Hope this helps

Hi,
Thank you so much for the reply.
Will configuring the mode as active backup take care of failure of NICs automatically?
Is there something to be configured in the switch also, as there are two switches looking at same MAC address...

I think this question is very vague, but can someone tell me if its possible to bond the ports of router also, so that the two Gigabit ethernet ports of router looks like one to the switch??
I am sorry again, if the question is not very sensible, but I am new to this and am still learning...

thank you in advance.

w/regards,
Jayesh