Strategies for Network Administration in Oracle^® Solaris 11.3

Combining Aggregations With VNICs for High Availability

The following scenario describes how to combine a Datalink Multipathing (DLMP) aggregation with VNICs for high availability. Combining the Use of Aggregations With VNICs graphically depicts this type of configuration.

The system that is used to create and configure the DLMP aggregation in the following example has a set of 10 Gigabit Ethernet NICs, as shown in the following output:

# dladm show-phys
LINK              MEDIA                STATE      SPEED  DUPLEX    DEVICE
net0              Ethernet             up         1000   full      e1000g0
net1              Ethernet             up         1000   full      e1000g1
net2              Ethernet             up         1000   full      e1000g2

Example 8  Configuring and Virtualizing DLMP Aggregations With VNICs

1. First, create the DLMP aggregation (aggr0) with probing enabled for the net1 and net2 interfaces, as shown in the following example:

   # dladm create-aggr -l net1 -l net2 -m dlmp -p probe-ip=+ aggr0

   Setting the probe-ip property enables probe-based detection failure with automatic selection of the source and target probing IP addresses. For details, see Configuring Probe-Based Failure Detection for DLMP Aggregation in Managing Network Datalinks in Oracle Solaris 11.3.

   Then, create an IP interface and address for the aggregation datalink as follows:

   # ipadm create-ip aggr0
   # ipadm create-addr -T dhcp aggr0

2. Virtualize the DLMP aggregation.

   You can then easily virtualize the aggregation by creating a VNIC over the aggregation datalink. For example, you would create a VNIC over aggr0 as follows:

   # dladm create-vnic -l aggr0 vnic0

   The newly created VNIC (vnic0) is now highly available. If one of the aggregated links (net1 or net2) fails, the traffic for that VNIC automatically fails over to the remaining link and the operation is transparent to the VNIC.

   View information about the aggregation by using either of the following commands:

   # dladm show-aggr
   LINK              MODE  POLICY   ADDRPOLICY           LACPACTIVITY LACPTIMER
   aggr0             dlmp  --       --                   --           --
       
   
   # dlstat show-aggr -x
   LINK       PORT           SPEED  DUPLEX   STATE         ADDRESS            PORTSTATE
   aggr0      --             1000Mb  full    up            0:14:4f:fa:ea:42   --
              net1           1000Mb  full    up            0:14:4f:fa:ea:42   attached
              net2           1000Mb  full    up            0:14:4f:f9:c:d     attached
   

Example 9  Specifying an Aggregation Datalink as the Lower Link of a Zone's anet Resource

Alternatively, you can virtualize an aggregation for high availability by specifying the aggregation datalink as the lower link of an Oracle Solaris zone's anet resource, as shown in the following example. Or, you can specify an aggregation datalink as the uplink of an EVS node. See Setting Up an EVS Virtual Tenant Network for an example of this type of configuration.

The following truncated example shows how you would specify an aggregation datalink as the lower link of a zone's anet resource during a zonecfg interactive session,.

# zonecfg -z zone1
.
.
.
zonecfg:zone1> add anet
zonecfg:zone1:anet> set lower-link=aggr0
.
.
.
zonecfg:zone1:anet> end
zonecfg:zone1> commit

For more information about using the zonecfg command interactively, see the zonecfg(1M) man page and Creating and Using Oracle Solaris Zones.