XCP NIC Bonding

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NIC bonding can improve server resiliency by using two physical NICs as if they were one. Two NICs may be bonded to create a single, high-performing channel that provides connectivity between VMs and your external network. [1]

You can create a NIC bond in XenCenter by using "Add Network" in the Networking tab and choosing Bonded network.

Active/Active

This is the default mode with traffic balanced between NICs using Source Level Balancing (SLB). This mode will only work properly on a single logical switch (e.g. a single physical switch, or multiple switches that are stacked with proprietary backplanes such that they appear as a single switch). The advantage of this mode is it will use both interfaces for increased capacity, and also will fail-over between ports if one fails.

Active/Backup

If you're trying to setup simple fail-over redundancy with 2 separate switches, you probably want active/backup, which you can only configure from the CLI.

The recommended method is setup the bond first in XenCenter, then change the type to active/backup as below:

xe bond-list

Pick out the bond's master UUID like master ( RO): 4b9c2fa4-daa0-f9e8-4313-90cfa57019f3

xe pif-param-set uuid=4b9c2fa4-daa0-f9e8-4313-90cfa57019f3 other-config:bond-mode=active-backup

References

  1. http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX124421
  2. http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX124421