Question on NIC teaming/trunking/bonding and IP aliasing

Hi Folks:

I've been doing some research into NIC teaming/trunking/bonding.
What a great set of features! Of particular interest to me at this
point is the bonding driver's active-backup mode of operation.

While I've found many references to the actual configuration of the
bonding driver, what is not yet clear to me is how or even if IP
aliasing can work hand-in-hand with NIC bonding. Is it possible for a
bonded interface to have multiple IP addresses associated with it? For
example, if two NICs (say "eth0" and "eth1") are bonded
together to form a virtual NIC named "bond0", in addition to having
IP address 192.168.0.1 bound to "bond0", would it be possible to
have another IP address, say 192.168.22.1, bound as an alias to
"bond0:1"? Is this goal accomplished in another manner? Or is NIC
bonding incompatible with IP aliasing?

Just in case it is relevant, the environment I'm working with is
Redhat Enterprise Linux 3 ES Update 4.

Thanks in advance for any insights that you might be able to provide.

Steve Underwood

 

Okay ... just to close this question ... after finally getting a
configuration together where I could test the "bonding" driver, I was
happy to find that the answer to my question was yes ... IP aliasing
does work hand-in-hand with NIC bonding. My experiance so far, as
limited as it may be, would indicate that software working on top of a
"bonded" interface just sees the "bonded" interface as a regular NIC
(assuming an "active-backup" mode of bonded operation has been
configured ... I did encounter application-layer problems when the
default round-robin mode of bonded operation was in effect - in this
case, I think our network-instructure might have been seeing one IP
associated with multiple NICs causing packet routing issues).

Steve

 

Okay ... just to close this question ... after finally getting a
configuration together where I could test the "bonding" driver, I was
happy to find that the answer to my question was yes ... IP aliasing
does work hand-in-hand with NIC bonding. My experiance so far, as
limited as it may be, would indicate that software working on top of a
"bonded" interface just sees the "bonded" interface as a regular NIC
(assuming an "active-backup" mode of bonded operation has been
configured ... I did encounter application-layer problems when the
default round-robin mode of bonded operation was in effect - in this
case, I think our network-instructure might have been seeing one IP
associated with multiple NICs causing packet routing issues).

Steve