HP Virtual Connect - Supported Bonding Mode for Linux in a VC Environment

Information

Unsupported bonding modes in an HP Virtual Connect environment can produce packet loss and/or performance issues.

Details

HP Virtual Connect supports bonding modes 1, 5, or 6. VC does not support modes 0 (round robin) or 7 (switch assisted load balancing).

Mode 1 : Active/backup. Active-backup policy: Only one slave in the bond is active. A different slave becomes active if, and only if, the active slave fails. The bond's MAC address is externally visible on only one port (network adapter) to avoid confusing the switch.

Mode 5 : Adaptive transmit load balancing: 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. Incoming traffic is received by the current slave. If the receiving slave fails, another slave takes over the MAC address of the failed receiving slave.

Mode 6 : Adaptive load balancing: 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.

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