tagged vlan interfaces on top of bonded network interfaces - useful for virtual hosts

[James Dinkel]

I put in a bug report here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/352384but it's not getting any
attention.  This seems like a rather critical bug,
especially for enterprise situations where 802.3ad link aggregation and
802.1q vlan tagging are more common.

With some googling around, I found some people saying the problem merely
because the vlan device is trying to be created before the bond device and
even found a patch for this for another debian-based distribution.

My personal usage of this is for a high-availability kvm virtualization
environment.  The bonding would be useful as running multiple servers will
require the added bandwidth and will make a failure a bigger problem as the
failure would affect multiple virtual guest servers instead of just one.
The vlans also a huge benefit as you can host-to-host traffic on it's own
vlan (such as migrations, which is what VMWare suggests doing with it's
products), and also you can create virtual routers with multiple nics
connected to seperate vlans, use a seperate dmz vlan for servers you want in
a dmz (even if you use a seperate router/firewall appliance), or just to
create servers that need to be on seperate networks.

We will be using VMWare ESX regardless of this for the foreseeable future,
so this isn't for my own benefit, but I wanted to bring attention to this
bug and also present the usage scenario to those who might find it useful.
I would however, one day, like to use Ubuntu/kvm for our virtual hosts and
this is one ability that will be an absolute necessity.

James
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-server/attachments/20090414/bb3e1fa8/attachment.html>