balance-rr or 0
This is the default, transmitting packets in order from the first available slave through the last, for load balancing and fault tolerance.
active-backup or 1
Only one of the bond slaves is used, and the others sit idle until the active slave fails.
balance-xor or 2
This has two possible behaviors, which you control with the xmit_hash_policy option. The default (layer2) is to generate a simple transmit hash based on the MAC addresses to decide which slave will carry a particular traffic stream. The nice thing about this is all traffic destined for a network peer will use the same interface, rather than splitting it up and possibly creating a bunch of out-of-order packets.
The other option, layer3+4, mimics some Cisco and other big name network devices. This stripes traffic across several slaves, which can be very fast, but it can also create out-of-order delivery. Under most circumstances on well-behaved networks this should not be a problem.
broadcast or 3
This transmits everything on all slave interfaces, so it’s useful mainly when each interface is connected to a separate switch going to separate networks.
802.3ad or 4
This is the official standards-based link aggregation technology for LAN switch ports, and for high-end server NICs. You still need a switch that supports 802.3ad, but you can use any Ethernet interface with a driver that supports Ethtool. Most Linux Ethernet drivers support Ethool, but a very few don’t. Just run the ethtool command to find out:
# ethtool eth0
Settings for eth0:
No data available
Oops, no support here. You should see some output like this:
Settings for eth1:
Supported ports: [ TP MII ]
Supported link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full
100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full
[...]
balance-tlb or 5
Adaptive transmit load balancing- outgoing traffic gets the benefit of bonded interfaces without needing support in the switch, but not incoming. The interface driver must support Ethtool. This also provides redundancy and failover.
balance-alb or 6
We know all about this–it’s similar to balance-tlb, except both send and receive traffic are bonded. This requires Ethtool support, and support for changing MAC addresses on active interfaces in the interface’s driver.
active-backup and broadcast don’t have that many practical applications. balance-rr and 802.3ad are probably the most useful on networks that use managed switches, for both performance and availability.
Tags:activation, bases, cisco, command, connection, create, Generator, idl, incoming, interface, linux, mac, network, networking, nic, port, ports, possibilities, Redundant, server, servers, switch, traffic
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