LACP on RHEL 6.4 - Sat, Dec 7, 2013

LACP, or the link aggregation control protocol, is a network protocol that enables active/active redundancy between network-connected devices. A common use for LACP is providing more than one physical network link between server and switch for redundancy purposes. Unlike other methods for providing redundancy, LACP also makes the total bandwidth of the links usable, meaning nothing is wasted.

Under Linux, LACP is provided as part of the bonding driver, specifically by passing the mode=4 option when loading the module.

Once the module is loaded, you can use ifenslave to "enslave" (…phrasing…) the physical network interfaces to a bonding interface. The physical network interfaces must be connected to network ports that provide LACP, and have been configured with the same LACP admin key.

Of course, you don't need to screw around with module options and ifenslave under most Linux distributions in order to configure an LACP-capable interface. Under RHEL 6.4, it's a matter of configuring the physical interfaces, and the bonding interface, using interface configuration files, which are found in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/.

For a typical two interface LACP setup, you would need to create three interface definitions. The first two (or more, if you would like to configure additional interfaces) looks like this:

#/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
DEVICE=eth0
USERCTL=no
NM_CONTROLLED=no
ONBOOT=yes
BOOTPROTO=none
SLAVE=yes
MASTER=bond0
HWADDR=00:00:00:00:be:ef

Change the interface name in the filename (ifcfg-eth0) and the DEVICE= line to match the interface name of the physical interface.

Also change the HWADDR= line to match the MAC address of the interface as well. This is really important, or the network scripts will freak out and apply this configuration to any interface it wants to. You can find the MAC address by looking at the output of ifconfig eth0 for the interface, replacing eth0 with the interface name.

You will need to create one interface definition file per physical interface involved in the LACP link.

You then need to create the logical interface, bond0. If you need to create multiple logical interfaces out of multiple groups of physical interfaces, in the MASTER= line of the physical interface definition files above, and in the name and DEVICE= line of the logical interface definition file below, you will need to substitute bond0 with bond1 etc.

#/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bond0
ONBOOT=yes
USERCTL=no
BOOTPROTO=none
BONDING_OPTS="mode=4"
NM_CONTROLLED=no
IPADDR=x.x.x.x
NETMASK=x.x.x.x

Note the BONDING_OPTS"mode=4"= line. This configures the bonding interface to use LACP. You can pass any options you like to the bonding module here as well. I have listed the IPADDR and NETMASK lines here to demonstration that the IP configuration should be recorded in the logical bonding interface configuration file, not the physical interface configuration files. If you are using a dynamic IP, you can set BOOTPROTO=DHCP to use DHCP instead of static IP configuration, removing the IPADDR and NETMASK lines.

For more information about what you can and can't put into these configuration files, take a look here.