Bonding

BONDED ETHERNET NICS SHOULD BE CONFIGURED TO SEPARATE SWITCHES

If you configure bonded Ethernet NICs to the same switch, you can experience up to 60 seconds of connection failure when a port fails. Outgoing data traffic experiences no issues.

It is recommended to configure bonded Ethernet NICs to separate switches, creating a fully-redundant topology, and no incoming connection failure window.

BONDING ISSUES WITH SOME ETHERNET CHIPS

Bonding is not supported on Ethernet chips that do not allow changing the MAC address while the chip is in the running state. In this case, the bonded network is rejected, and the "Operation not supported" error message is returned. This occurs on 3Com and some other older 10/100 Ethernet chips. Bonding is not supported on 3Com Ethernet chips (Marvell) that do not support interface carrier states. This causes bonding to keep the state as "up" when it should be "down", therefore never switching to the backup link. Broadcom and Intel chips are recommended.