[CentOS] Bonding modes

[nate]

Paras pradhan wrote:
> I have a bonded interface running in mode 1 which is active/passive and no
> issue with this. I need to change it to mode 0 for active/active setup. Does
> mode 0 is dependent on the switches configuration? My setup is: 2 links from
> bonded interface is connected to different switches.

You really should go the 802.3ad route (mode=4) if anything, this
does require switch support. You can get unpredictable results with
mode=0, and if you want best performance and availability stick
to 802.3ad, which does require going to the same switch(or stack
of switches).

Myself with bonding on linux I use only mode=1.

Another user like yourself posted on this topic a few months ago
asking the same kind of question, and went down the non-802.3ad
route and had major issues.

Also note that your single-stream performance will not exceed that
of a single link between hosts. So if your doing a file transfer
between two hosts for example and you have several 1GbE links
between them the throughput of that transfer will not exceed
1Gbps. Load balancing is done on a per MAC/IP/tcp port basis
depending on the equipment in use.

10GbE is really cheap these days(cheaper than 1GbE in some cases
on a per Gb basis) if you need faster performance, and simple
to configure, I wrote a blog on this a couple of months ago:

http://www.techopsguys.com/2009/11/17/affordable-10gbe-has-arrived/

nate