Can I create high availability (HA) with switches and network interface Card (NIC) bonding?
What's the best way to create high availability utilizing a couple of switches and NIC bonding? I'm looking at stacking four Dell PowerConnect 6248's, then bonding two NICs on my servers and having one NIC go to one switch and the other NIC to another switch. I'm assuming if the two switches my bonded NICs are plugged into go down, then it's game over, even though I've got two other switches in the stack still up. Is there a better way go about doing this?
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ASKED:
June 17, 2009 8:46 PM
UPDATED:
June 26, 2009 5:02 PM
Answer Wiki:
When you stack switches up you actually don’t provide any high availability (HA) functionality but you get more number of ports with better management. You should have both the network interface cards (NICs) connect to two different switches (you use only two switches if you have less than 48 servers) or two different stacks (if you have more than 48 servers.)
Hope this helps.
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I don’t think you can bond together two nics and have them on different switches. They should be on the same switch and bonded together (trunked) on the switch side also.
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Troy, that is not correct. Many of the Cisco switches allow you to do this. They act together as a single switch and you can trunk to different switches to produce the high availability. Now whether the Dell switches are capable of doing that, I don’t know. Probably not. You get what you pay for.
It will not allow youdo span switches with the trunk with PAgP, you have to change the protocol to LACP. that will allow you to have a 2 or more switch stack and have a port from each switch as a member of the portchannel.
Thanks for the clarification. I was unsure about my answer so it is nice to get additional details.