Hello All,

I work for a Health care company at a local trauma hospital. I maintain a Picture Archiving and Communication System (PAC's). Basically, any medical images (X-Ray, CT, MRI, Mammo, etc) are stored digitally on the servers for viewing and dictation from diagnostic stations. I took over this job about 8 months ago. Considering this is a major hub hospital I have made a huge effort to pinpoint and eliminate single points of failure. I have scripted nightly system back ups of major (core) systems and tested disaster recovery and high availability systems. Any problems I have found I have corrected promptly.

My last single point of failure ends up being the network connectivity. My core systems are connected by one (1) Ethernet connection to the hospitals network. This introduces single points of failure across the entire network path. The systems could be brought down by switch or switch port failure.

So..... I decided to research Solaris IPMP. Since "most" of my core servers run Solaris 9 I figured this would be a good solution especially since I can guarantee each network connection is connected to its own switch.

My problem however, is that my companies software is licensed by the MAC address. Most Sun boxes have a per machine MAC ID versus a typically per port configuration. Well, from my research IPMP requires both interfaces to have unique ID's. So Solaris must be configured at the firmware to use different MAC addresses on each NIC. Is there a way to not only failover IP/netmask but also the MAC address?

Basically, each system has two (2) NIC's. I want to have the primary NIC hold the only Public address and licensed MAC address. The secondary interface will hold a private address on a separate subnet with a separate MAC address. When a failure is found the primary NIC will fail to a its own unique private IP and MAC address; the secondary NIC will then fail over to the primaries IP & MAC. This should provide continuous uptime without invalidating the systems license.

Has any one down anything similar? Any crib notes, ideas, sources of info or thoughts?