Many names are used to title network interface bonding: Port Trunking, Channel Bonding, Link Aggregation, NIC teaming, and others. Bonding combines or aggregates multiple network connections into a single channel bonded interface. Bonding allows two or more network interfaces to act as one, increase throughput, and provide redundancy or failover.
The ADC’s kernel has a built-in Bonding driver for aggregating multiple physical network interfaces into a single logical interface (for example, aggregating eth0 and eth1 into bond0). For each bonded interface, you can define the mode and the link monitoring options. There are seven different mode options, each providing specific load balancing and fault tolerance characteristics. These are shown in the image below.
Note: Bonding can only be configured for hardware-based ADC appliances.
Creating a Bonding profile
Click on Add button to add a new Bond
Provide a name for the bonding configuration
Choose which bonding mode you wish to use
Then from the Interfaces section, select the Bonding mode you wish to use from the Bond drop-down field for the network interface.
In the example below, eth0, eth1, and eth2 are now part of bond0. While Eth0 remains on its own as the management interface.
Bonding Modes
Bonding Mode
Description
balance-rr:
Packets are sequentially transmitted/received through each interface one by one.
active-backup:
In this mode, one interface will be active, and the second interface will be on standby. This secondary interface only becomes active if the active connection on the first interface fails.
balance-xor:
Transmits based on source MAC address XOR’d with destination MAC address. This option selects the same slave for each destination Mac address.
broadcast:
This mode will transmit all data on all slave interfaces.
802.3ad:
Creates aggregation groups that share the same speed and duplex settings and utilizes all the slaves in the active aggregator following the 802.3ad specification.
balance-tlb:
The Adaptive transmit load balancing bonding mode: Provides 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. The current slave receives incoming traffic. If the receiving slave fails, another slave takes over the MAC address of the failed receiving slave.
balance-alb:
The Adaptive load balancing bonding mode: also 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.
