09-10-2010
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As I come from other OS'es than Solaris, LCAP and IPMP looks very similar to me. It is both a form of Etherchannel, Bonding, Trunking or whatever names are being used for it when to have some kind of network failover and/or load balancing.
Of course whatever name you take, whatever OS you take, you want some redundancy for your network connect in case an adapter, a switch or anything else on the way to the network fails.
On Linux you usually take bonding. On Solaris I guess it is IPMP. Make sure you have each network adapter, that is part of such a bonding/IPMP, being connected to two different switches for redundancy.
With 2 adapters on your Linux box there is not much choice anyway where to bind and connect what. For the 4 adapters on your Solaris box(es), you'll have to decide if you split/bind those. Depending on the case that you might need more bandwith, you can maybe have something like:
A "bonded" device that contains of all 4 adapters, where 3 go to a switch A as primary connection being all active for bandwith purpose and having 1 backup adapter to another switch in case those 3 fail. But for details what is possible with IPMP, check the documentations or ask in the Solaris sub forum maybe.
You can also use 1x2 "bonded" Adapters for production network and the other pair for backup (in terms of data network backup) purposes. Up to you.
Edit:
Forgot to say, that your switches etc. have to support trunking/etherchannel etc.
For Jumbo Frames it is just a matter, if your NICs support it and also the switches. You will also have to try out if you have any advantage of it, I guess.
Last edited by zaxxon; 09-10-2010 at 01:39 AM..
Reason: added information