802.3ad for failover on Dell PowerConnects & Linux

Fri Mar 5 17:38:49 PST 2004

Greetings all!

So, my experience with channel bonding/trunking has always either been
with going switch to switch, or just doing normal channel bonding over
multiple unconnected vlans for link aggregation..

I have a network with a pair of Alteon 184s in front of 2 powerconnect
5224's (unfortunately.. purchasing decision made before I started here).

I want to use 802.3ad in failover mode for all of my servers on the
powerconnect switches.. My manager seems to think Dell's switch won't
support this, though I think he's wrong.  I can't actually test any
of this until our outage window on sunday.. 

I'm also unclear as to the network setup..  What I've done before was
seperate VLANS for the aggregated trunking.. I'm being told I'll have
to turn the two switches into one big vlan (since dell doesn't STP over
multiple vlans.. thanks dell), cross-connect the two switches, hook
my 184s in as uplinks, and then plug eth0 on all the servers into the left
half of the network, eth1 into the right half.. This seems wrong to me.. 
I'm not familiar with 802.3ad, but it seems that turning everything into
one big collision domain will cause MAC address problems, with both ethernet
cards responding to arp requests saying they have the virtual channel bonded
ip address...  Am I wrong on this?

-------------------
Michael T. Halligan
Chief Geek
Halligan Infrastructure Designs.
http://www.halligan.org/
2250 Jerrold Ave #11
San Francisco, CA 94124-1012
(415) 724.7998 - Mobile