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Veritas NetBackup™ Flex Scale Administrator's Guide

Last Published: 2025-02-12

Product(s): Appliances (3.2)

Platform: NetBackup Flex Scale OS

About bonding Ethernet interfaces

Bonding associates a set of two or more Ethernet interfaces with one IP address. The association improves network performance on each NetBackup Flex Scale cluster node by increasing the potential bandwidth available on an IP address beyond the limits of a single Ethernet interface. Bonding also provides redundancy for higher availability.

For example, you can bond two 1 gigabit Ethernet interfaces together to provide up to 2 gigabits per second of throughput to a single IP address. Moreover, if one of the interfaces fails, communication continues using the single Ethernet interface.

When you create a bond, you need to specify a bonding mode. In addition, for the following bonding modes: 802.3ad, active-backup, balance-rr, balance-xor, broadcast, balance-tlb, and balance-alb, make sure that the base network interface driver is configured correctly for the bond type. For type 802.3ad, the switch must be configured for link aggregation.

The 802.3ad and balance-xor bond types have an option of sub-types, layer2 and layer(3+4).

Consult your vendor-specific documentation for port aggregation and switch set-up. You can use the -s option in the Linux ethtool command to check if the base driver supports the link speed retrieval option. The balance-alb bond mode type works only if the underlying interface network driver enables you to set a link address.

Note:

An added IPv6 address may go into a TENTATIVE state while bonding Ethernet interfaces with balance-rr, balance-xor, or broadcast bond modes. While bonding with those modes, NetBackup Flex Scale requires the switch to balance incoming traffic across the ports, and not deliver looped back packets or duplicates. To work around this issue, enable EtherChannel on your switch, or avoid using these bond modes.

Table: Bonding mode

Index	Bonding mode	Fault tolerance	Load balancing	Switch setup	Ethtool/base driver support
1	balance-rr	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
2	active-backup	Yes	No	No	No
3	balance-xor	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
4	broadcast	Yes	No	Yes	No
5	802.3ad	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes (to retrieve speed)
6	balance-tlb	Yes	Yes	No	Yes (to retrieve speed)
7	balance-alb	Yes	Yes	No	Yes (to retrieve speed)

Note:

When you create or remove a bond, SSH connections with Ethernet interfaces involved in that bond may be dropped. When the operation is complete, you must restore the SSH connections to continue administering the appliance.

Note:

When you create or remove a bond, the NetBackup services go offline as the device name for all the IPs of the data network change . You have to bring the IPs online on the new device name (either bond or base device). The NetBackup services come up after the bond create or bond remove operation is completed.