[Xen-users] xen and bonding

[Mike Williams <mike.williams@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I'm investigating the use of Xen for a new project, and have come up against a 
possible problem that I haven't been able to solve myself yet, and I'm hoping 
someone here can help.

Firstly, some background.
Our web presence is currently served by a pair of failover firewalls, a pair 
of failover webservers, a pair of failover databases, etc.
Now though our biggest customer wants us to be more reliable, and resilient, 
even though we're not exactly unreliable now!
What they want is dual power supplies everywhere, immediate automatic failover 
everywhere, each half of a pair in physically separate racks, etc.
Heartbeat does our failover, and as we require the backup to be up and running 
at all times, virtual IPs are used, so each VM must be able to add IP aliases 
at anytime without the host doing anything.

To save money, and not waste huge amounts of horse power (our stuff is several 
years old, and still perfectly capable), we want to use Xen for certain 
things. Hence me being here.

The problem I'm coming up against now is ethernet bonding. Dual PSU switches 
are expensive, and rare, but Linux supports ethernet bonding easily, so I 
want to put 2 switches wherever there would be one, and 
round-robin/active-backup all connections.
I've given up on bonding interfaces on the host, as the moving about of 
IPs/MACs, renaming interfaces, doesn't work* with bonding.
So I've moved on to bonding interfaces inside the VM. The bond comes up 
properly, lists both interfaces, but it doesn't get any MII interfaces so no 
failover will ever occur, in round-robin setup half the packets will get lost 
if a switch/port fails.

Thoughts/advice anyone?

Thanks


* /proc/net/bonding/ contains a list of "bonds", renaming bond0 to pbond0 
means that bond0 can't be started as it doesn't exist anymore.

-- 
Mike Williams
System Administration Manager - Comodo
Office Tel Europe: +44 (0) 161 8747070
Fax Europe: +44 (0) 161 8771767

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