Bonding and Clusters

In This Section Overview Bonding - High Availability Mode Bonding - Load Sharing Mode Performance Guidelines for Bonding Monitoring Bond Interfaces Troubleshooting Bonded Interfaces

Overview

Link Aggregation is a technique that bonds two or more network interfaces together on a Security Gateway. The interface bond gives High Availability redundancy in the event of interface failure and, and in Load Sharing mode, can significantly increase throughput.

In an interface bond, between two and eight physical interfaces are set to act as a single logical interface, using the same IP address.

The bond is a virtual interface, defined on the OS, similar to a physical interface. Each physical interface in a bond is called a slave interface of that bond. Enslaved interfaces do not function independently of the bond.

Link Aggregation can be configured to one of two modes:

• High Availability (Active/Backup) mode - only one interface at a time is active. Upon interface failure, the bond fails over to another interface. Different interfaces of the bond can be connected to different switches, to add switch High Availability to interface High Availability.

  Note - Link-state initiated internal bond failover requires a network interface that supports the Media-Independent Interface (MII) standard.

• Load Sharing (Active/Active) mode - all interfaces are active, for different connections. Connections are balanced between interfaces according to network layers three and four, and follow either the IEEE 802.3ad standard or XOR. Load Sharing mode has the advantage of increasing throughput, but requires connecting all the interfaces of the bond to one switch.

For Link Aggregation High Availability mode and for Link Aggregation Load Sharing mode:

• The number of bond interfaces that can be defined is limited by the maximum number of interfaces supported by each platform. See the Release Notes for the appropriate Check Point release.
• Up to 8 NICs can be configured in a single High Availability or Load Sharing bond.