I have one p5 server, no lpar, 2 physical network adapter, bundle as one EtherChannel. The two 2 physical network adapter connect to 2 network switches.
How to make this as a redundancy config?
Current is if one physical network adapter down, the seond one will go through the network. but if one switch down, what will happen?
the same - it will just failover to the other adapter as the failover is happening when the ping fails for whatever reason.
Regards
zxmaus
When you go into "smitty etherchannel", change/show, choose your etherchannel, look at the "Mode". You can have "standard" which means it only uses the secondary adapter when the first one loses it's connection. When this happens, you'll see something like "etherchannel failover" in the errpt. You'll see another error in the errpt when it goes back over to the primary adapters... something like "etherchannel restored" or "ether path restored"... I can't remember for sure, but you do see an event everytime it changes.
You can also set "Mode" to "round_robin" which means that it sends so many packets through one adapter and then so many packets through the other adapter and keeps switching back and forth. All this does is split your network traffic between the two adapters.
Both settings are good for redundancy. It just depends on how/if you want your data split between the two adapters.
I have personally physically removed adapters and plugged in other ones, always making sure at least one has a physical connection to the switch, and AIX handled it just fine. It recorded a bunch of errors in the errpt, but that was expected.a