Managing Network Datalinks in Oracle® Solaris 11.2

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Updated: September 2014
 
 

Benefits of Link Aggregation

    Link aggregation has the following benefits:

  • Increased bandwidth – The capacity of multiple links is combined into one logical link.

  • Automatic failover and failback – The traffic from a failed link is automatically switched over to other working links in the aggregation, thereby achieving high availability.

  • Improved administration – All underlying links are administered as a single unit.

  • Less drain on the network address pool – The entire aggregation can be assigned one IP address.

Because link aggregation groups multiple links into a single logical datalink, features of datalinks such as link protection and resource management work well with link aggregations. For information about link protection, see Chapter 1, Using Link Protection in Virtualized Environments, in Securing the Network in Oracle Solaris 11.2 . For information about resource management, see Chapter 7, Managing Network Resources, in Managing Network Virtualization and Network Resources in Oracle Solaris 11.2 .

Link aggregation overcomes some of the problems that are encountered when using high availability features with network virtualization, for example IPMP. With link aggregation, you create the aggregation in a global zone first, then specify it as the underlying link when you configure the non-global zone. When the zone boots, it is assigned a virtual network interface card (VNIC) on the link aggregation. Unlike IPMP, which needs to be configured in every non-global zone, link aggregations are configured in global zones only and provide highly available VNICs to non-global zones. The global zone can also configure properties such as bandwidth on the VNICs assigned to the zone.


Note -  Link aggregations perform similar functions to IP multipathing (IPMP) to improve network performance and availability at the datalink layer. For a comparison of these two technologies, see Appendix A, Link Aggregations and IPMP: Feature Comparison.

    The following types of link aggregations are supported:

  • Trunk aggregations

  • Datalink multipathing (DLMP) aggregations

For the differences between these two types of link aggregations, see Comparing Trunk and DLMP Aggregation.