Ethernet Bonding on Oracle Linux 6

Bonding technology provides an additional benefit in that with multiple network interfaces effectively supporting the same communications channel, a fault within a single network interface in a bonded group does not stop communication. For example, you have a bonded setup with four network interfaces providing a single interface channel between two DRBD servers. If one network interface fails, communication can continue on the other three without interruption, although at a lower speed.

I will give an example for bonding. I will use 4 ethernet interface for 2 different connection areas which are public and private connections. You can use these connections for cluster systems.

You have to do below processes with root user.

Disable Network Manager

service NetworkManager stop
chkconfig NetworkManager off

Create bond0 and bond1 Interface

vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bond0

DEVICE=”bond0″
BROADCAST=”192.168.10.255″
GATEWAY=”192.168.10.1″
IPADDR=”192.168.10.10″
NETMASK=”255.255.255.0″
ONBOOT=”yes”
USERCTL=no
BONDING_OPTS=”mode=0 miimon=100 downdelay=300 updelay=300″

vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bond1

DEVICE=”bond1″
BROADCAST=”192.168.10.255″
GATEWAY=”192.168.10.1″
IPADDR=”192.168.10.12″
NETMASK=”255.255.255.0″
ONBOOT=”yes”
USERCTL=no
BONDING_OPTS=”mode=0 miimon=100 downdelay=300 updelay=300″

You can then configure additional parameters for the kernel module. Typical parameters are the mode option and the miimon option.

The mode option specifies how the network interfaces are used. The default setting is 0, which means that each network interface is used in a round-robin fashion (this supports aggregation and fault tolerance). Using setting 1 sets the bonding mode to active-backup. This means that only one network interface is used as a time, but that the link automatically fails over to a new interface if the primary interface fails. This settings only supports fault-tolerance.

The miimon option enables the MII link monitoring. A positive value greater than zero indicates the monitoring frequency in milliseconds for checking each slave network interface that is configured as part of the bonded interface. A typical value is 100.

Configure eth0 and eth1 Interfaces for bond0 (Add or Change Below Texts)

vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

DEVICE=eth0
BOOTPROTO=none
MASTER=bond0
HWADDR=00:01:02:03:04:05
ONBOOT=yes
SLAVE=yes
USERCTL=no

vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1

DEVICE=eth1
BOOTPROTO=none
MASTER=bond0
HWADDR=00:01:02:03:04:06
ONBOOT=yes
SLAVE=yes
USERCTL=no

Change eth2 and eth3 Interfaces for bond1

vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth2

DEVICE=eth2
BOOTPROTO=none
MASTER=bond1
HWADDR=00:01:02:03:04:50
ONBOOT=yes
SLAVE=yes
USERCTL=no

vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth3

DEVICE=eth3
BOOTPROTO=none
MASTER=bond1
HWADDR=00:01:02:03:04:60
ONBOOT=yes
SLAVE=yes
USERCTL=no

Configure Modprobe

vi /etc/modprobe.d/bonding.conf

alias eth0 e1000e
alias eth1 e1000e
alias eth2 e1000e
alias eth3 e1000e
alias bond0 bonding
alias bond1 bonding

Network Restart

modprobe bonding
service network restart

Note : If you do not see below screen, you can reboot system.

Finally, You can use these configurations on Oracle Linux 6.x, Redhat Linux 6.x, Centos 6.x.

Source : Oracle Offical Documents