We started testing some NIC bonding on our RHEL 5 VM and we will be testing on real hardware soon. The ultimate goal is to add this setup in our kickstart file.

We created these files for testing:

/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bond0

DEVICE=bond0
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
ONBOOT=yes
USERCTL=no
IPV6INIT=no

Added these lines to /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 and ifcfg-eth1:

MASTER=bond0
SLAVE=yes

in /etc/modprobe.conf we added these lines:

alias bond0 bonding
options bond0 miimon=100 mode=1

We just need to test on some physical servers and see how all this works now.

Reference:

• http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_books/rhel5/rhel5_administration/rhel5_s1-modules-ethernet.html#s2-modules-bonding
• http://mergy.org/tag/rhel-5/

Posted on April 23