Wednesday, February 3. 2010
Of course it's a little bit tedious to zip cables from your switch to test IPMP or to deconfigure an interface to force traffic on different interfaces when you want to do some maintainance work in your network. There is an command to on- and offline physical connections in an IPMP group. It's called if_mpadm.
Continue reading "Less known Solaris features - IP Multipathing (Appendix A): if_mpadm"
Friday, January 22. 2010
It isn't really a less known feature for many experienced Solaris admins. On production system they already use IPMP. But many people new to Solaris aren't aware of the existence of an IP multipathing framework in Solaris and Opensolaris. This tutorial consisting out of eleven parts wants to give an brief introduction to this topic. Additionally it covers the new IPMP implementation, that found it's way into the code at build 107. Thus it's interesting for long-time admins as well.
I hope, this tutorial gives you a good insight into this interesting topic.
Friday, January 22. 2010
The nice thing about IPMP is: It's simply there. You can use it. When you have more than one interface in your system and you care about the availability of your network, it takes you just a few seconds to activate at least the link-based variant of IPMP. This fruit is really hanging just a few centimeters above the ground.
Continue reading "Less known Solaris features - IP Multipathing (Part 11): Conclusion"
Friday, January 22. 2010
At the end of this tutorial i want to talk about some tricks, tips and comments in regard of new and classic IPMP.
Continue reading "Less known Solaris features - IP Multipathing (Part 10): Tips, Tricks and other comments"
Friday, January 22. 2010
We've configured both mechanisms now. Let's summarize what we have seen so far. When you use the new IPMP the data address is bound to its own interface. Whatever happens to the physical interface there are no changes to the binding of interfaces to ip addresses.
Continue reading "Less known Solaris features - IP Multipathing (Part 9): Classic and new IPMP compared"
Friday, January 22. 2010
IPMP itself is a really old feature. It's in Solaris for several versions now. Just the implementation I've described before is a new one. But in Solaris 10 you don't have this new IPMP implementation. Solaris 10 still uses the old implementation. I will call the old implementation classic IPMP. The basic mechanism of new and classic IPMP is pretty much the same: Providing failure detection mechanisms and switch something to do a failover thus the data address stays available. But internally it's a completely different implementation. While the new mechanism is certainly the future of IPMP, I' m pretty sure you will old mechanism more often in the wild.
Continue reading "Less known Solaris features - IP Multipathing (Part 8): Classic IPMP"
Friday, January 22. 2010
As I wrote before there is another way to protect your system against the failure of a network connection - Link Aggregation. As i've explained before, there are failure modes that can't be addressed by link aggregation. But you can use both in conjunction. This makes sense, when your main connection is a 10GBe interface and you don't want to plug a second one into the system and use already existent 1GBe Interfaces as a backup for it instead.
Continue reading "Less known Solaris features - IP Multipathing (Part 7): New IPMP and link aggregation"
Friday, January 22. 2010
When you want to try new IPMP, you need a fairly recent build of OpenSolaris. New IPMP was integrated into Build 107 for the first time.
At first: If you have already a working IPMP configuration, you can simply reuse this config. However it yields a different looking, but functionally equivalent result compared to your system with Classic IPMP. This is made possible by some automagic functions in New IPMP. One example is the implicit creation of the IPMP interface with the name of the IPMP group when there isn't already an IPMP interface in the group. However explicit creation should be prefered as you can choose a better name for your IPMP interface and the dependencies are much more obvious.
Continue reading "Less known Solaris features - IP Multipathing (Part 6): New IPMP"
Thursday, January 21. 2010
At first you need a testbed. In this tutorial I will use a system with three interfaces. Two of them are Intel networking cards. They are named e1000g0 and e1000g0. The third interface is an onboard Realtek LAN adapter called rge0.
Continue reading "Less known Solaris features - IP Multipathing (Part 5): Prerequisites"
Thursday, January 21. 2010
IPMP vs. Link aggregation
Link aggregation is available on many switches for quite a while now. With link aggregation it is possible to bundle a number of interfaces into a single logical interface.
Continue reading "Less known Solaris features - IP Multipathing (Part 4): Foundations 3"
Thursday, January 21. 2010
As I wrote before, there are two methods of failure detection. Link based failure detection and probe based failure detection. Both have advantages and disadvantages.
Continue reading "Less known Solaris features - IP Multipathing (Part 3): Foundations 2"
Thursday, January 21. 2010
The fundamental concepts of both implementations are pretty much the same, thus I will start with a short introduction into the nomenclature of IPMP. I scarified some precision to make it easier to understand, but for our purposes the precision is more than sufficient.
Continue reading "Less known Solaris features - IP Multipathing (Part 2): Foundations 1"
Thursday, January 21. 2010
root was sitting in SuperUser castle and everything was fine in the kingdom. But then a loud squeaking and creaking noise found root's attention. The demons of hypertext wrote into the Scrolls of Log, that they couldn't fulfill their work any longer, as the sole bridge into the vast kingdom of root lowered at this moment was broken.
Continue reading "Less known Solaris features - IP Multipathing (Part 1): Introduction"
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