Swarm Network Redundancy Planning

Owned by Anjali Tyagi
Last updated: Nov 21, 2023 by Bala Harish A(AC)
2 min read

Network Bonding Modes

Swarm supports the following network port bonding modes (as supported by the Linux kernel):

  • active-backup (bonding mode 1)

  • balance-alb (bonding mode 6)

  • 802.3ad (bonding mode 4)

Bonding mode 6 (balance-alb) is only supported when using a single peer switch. For the requirement of using multiple switch chassis to provide switch layer redundancy, configure Swarm to use bonding mode 1 (active-backup). The customer can also choose bonding mode 4 (802.3ad) to use with further planning and testing.

Recommended

Bonding mode 1 (active-backup) is advised for “out of the box” multi-switch and multi-chassis link aggregation (MLAG) configurations, whereas bonding mode 4 (802.3ad) needs additional configuration on the switch side to function. Since failover and traffic balancing with MLAG are proprietary to switch vendors, it is necessary to review switch capability to determine the appropriate bonding mode for MLAG (i.e., bonding mode 1 (active-backup) or bonding mode 4 (802.3ad).

Using Multi-port NICs

Swarm bonds the NIC ports and detects and uses a single IP address for the bond definition.

Info

Multiport network cards (two or more ports per card) are not considered fully redundant when used in Swarm storage hosts.

Multiport NICs experience common failure modes to disconnect a Swarm host. A true 'active-active' design includes the use of separate NICs in the storage hosts to meet that requirement.

PXE Boot in MLAG Configuration

PXE passthrough behavior is important in either an L2 or L3 MLAG configuration. Configuring nodes for network (PXE) boot when 802.3ad and MLAG are in place can be difficult, so planning and testing are critical for such configurations.

Note

The vendor implementations of PXE passthrough for MLAG can differ and may behave inconsistently, therefore active-backup bonding mode is strongly advised in this scenario.

 

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