How to setup a lacp bond for multiple network connections in XenServer

networkingxenxenserver

We're currently looking to use XenServer with Essentials for XenServer Enterprise together with a iSCSI SAN. What we're looking to do is to bond 4 gigabit ethernet connections to provide a large link to the iSCSI dedicated network.

From reading around it seems that the bonding within XenServer isn't great when used for a storage network (only providing balancing across upto two network connections). Is anyone using LACP successfully with XenServer, or some other method to bond more than two connections?

Best Answer

Citrix recommend not managing your storage networks from Xenserver. The Xenserver manual discusses how to mark physical interfaces as not managed, and once you've done that, you can do whatever you like in terms of configuring bonding on interfaces - and at this point, it's just the same as configuring an LACP bond on 4 ports on any standard Linux system

Note that doing this means you cannot allocate these NICs to any VMs. You'll need additional NICs in the system for management of Xenserver, and for server traffic.

It's also worth pointing out that, unless it was fixed recently, the management interface for Xenserver cannot be part of a bond.