How to configure the NIC, MultiNICA or MultiNICB Agents in Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) to monitor aggregated interfaces on Solaris platform

Problem

How to configure the NIC, MultiNICA or MultiNICB Agents in Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) to monitor aggregated interfaces on Solaris platform.

Solution

The link aggregation feature of Solaris aggregates multiple network interfaces so that they appear as a single interface. For example, we can combine bge0 and bge1 and name the combined interface aggr100. Similarly an IP, IPMultiNIC or IPMultiNICB resource can be configured to configure and monitor an IP address on the aggregated interface.

VCS networking agents support link aggregation, but VCS has no control over the local adapter swapping performed by the Operating System's link aggregation module. VCS considers the aggregated NIC interfaces just like any other NIC interface and there is no difference in the VCS configuration if using single Network Interfaces like bge0, ce0, qfe0 or an aggregated Network Interface like aggr100. The only difference in configuration while using Aggregated interfaces will be that the aggregated interface will be identified by the Device attribute of the VCS agent. All other similar rules will apply for each agent type.

For instance, if configuring a NIC resource in VCS which uses an aggregated NIC interface aggr100 that is an aggregated link of bge0 and bge1, the VCS configuration would need to be configured using the Device attribute as aggr100 as shown below:

        NIC nic-aggr100 (
                Device = aggr100
                NetworkHosts = { "166.93.2.1", "166.99.1.2" }
                )

Similarly, if configuring a MultiNICA or MultiNICB resource in VCS which uses an aggregated NIC interfaces, then it would be required to have two aggregated interfaces for configuring the VCS resource. Each aggregated interface will need to be configured at the Operating System level. For instance lets say that an aggregated interface aggr100 is an aggregated link of bge0 and bge1, and an aggregated interface aggr101 is an aggregated link of bge2 and bge3, then the VCS configuration would need to be configured using the Device attributes to configure aggr100 and aggr101 as shown below:

        MultiNICB mnicb-aggr100-101 (
                Device @north = { aggr100 = 0, aggr101 = 1 }
                Device @south = { aggr100 = 0, aggr101 = 1 }
                NetworkHosts = { "166.93.2.1", "166.99.1.2" }
                )

Please note, it is not known to use Solaris IPMP over aggregated links and hence, customer's should contact the Operating System vendor to inquire about support for this functionality. If supported by the OS vendor, then the MultiNICB resource may be configured with "UseMpathd = 1" as it would be configured with non aggregated interfaces.

Applies To

Veritas Cluster Server configuration on Solaris Platform with aggregated NIC interfaces