AIX / Etherchannel / VLANs

UNIX AIX
1

I have 1 AIX server, 4 dual ported fiber attached ethernet cards and 4 VLANS coming in. Is it possible to present those 8 ports as 1 IP address using etherchannel? Thanks.

2

hm you have 4 vlans, so you should have 4 ip-adresses

when you just want one ip-adress you need one vlan

but anyway it is possible to channel 8 ports,

see
"smitty etherchannel"

the channeled ports should be on the same switch/router, 8 ports on the same switch is not really recommended, the 4 cards should be from the same type

also talk to your network team, port channeling/trunking must be configured on the switch too in most cases

3

funksen, what are the pros/cons of one vlan vs. 4 vlans. This, as you might guess, is a new server that will be dedicated to 4 TSM instances. I'm thinking maybe I want one vlan coming in and all 8 NICs presented as one. This will make failover as well as client administration much easier. Thans for any insight.

4

Yes, it is possible with seperate VLAN's (but not with etherchannel). Research VIPA. You'll need to enable OSPF on the VLAN's and on your host. This works, but can be confusing and difficult to maintain.

The preffered option, however, is what was stated above. Put them all on the same VLAN and use etherchannel/link aggregation.

5

hm the tsm-instances have different ports, so you don't need more ip-Adresses on the same subnet

if you wan't different IPs, you can set up one vlan, and set IP-aliases on the interface

or for load balancing, bandwith limitations and so on, you could set up 2/3/4 channeled interfaces to make sure each instance has it's own 2/4/6 gbit/s

do you have your 4 Cards/8 Ports connected to one or two switches ?

6

Ok... this is getting interesting. Here is the proposal: 4 dual ported NICS, two switches, 4 VLANS. However, this setup prevents me from doing etherchannel/link aggregation. My goal is to present all 4 of my TSM instances that reside on this host, as one IP address. VIPA is not an option...been there, done that.

  1. How could I do that even if it was 1 vlan, if coming off two switches?
  2. How can I do that coming off of 4 vlan's, two switches?