The NIC Bonding

A small tutorial on NIC bonding, also known as NIC Aggregation (in Linux world), as NIC Teaming (in windows world), Port Trunking (among the PC hardware guys), The tutorial has been prepared by my buddy Bhavesh Vala, he has the same thing on his blog too, and my bug thanks to him for allowing me to copy it over to my blog. The reason i copied: this was something a new concept for me, which i learnt from Bhavesh, and its really a very useful thing for the sysadmins, i’ll give you a little description on what exactly this is :

Nic teaming is like, you have two ethernet cards on your server, but you bind it as if they were one ethernet card, the advantage is, normally what happens is you assign an ip address to your server, and all your users and developers use that ip address in their scripts, also your website or db may be running on that ip address, what if the net goes down, i mean to say you have purchased some internet service and ip address from some ISP, so what if the ISP’s net goes down, so your website is down, that really affects, here is how nic bonding helps your servers, once you have done the nic bonding, if for any reason any one of the ethernet card fails, the other takes over and your service is continued.

I am also posting the contents of /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bond0, /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 and /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1 file at the end which we have configured on our server, may be that would help you as good live example:

So What is NIC Bonding?

The concept of NIC Bonding (or sometimes called NIC Teaming) is that you have two NICs bonded together to appear as if they are the same physical device. i.e. They will both present the same Hardware (MAC) address. This is accomplished through the “ifenslave” utility, which enables the kernel to see/use only one device.

NIC Bonding also be known as:-