IPMP Support in Mac OS X Server?

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IPMP Support in Mac OS X Server?

Hello all,

I'm a Solaris Admin working on setting up an Xserve. I'd like to set up a virtual IP address to float between the two physical network interfaces (In Solaris this is called IP Multi-pathing or IPMP). Can anyone point me to documentation on how to accomplish this? So far, all I have stumbled upon is the "bonddev" option in ifconfig which sounds like what I want. But I have no idea how to use it and I can't seem to find any examples.

Thanks!
-Ben

Xserve, Mac OS X (10.4.10)

Posted on Jul 6, 2007 7:02 AM

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Answer 1

Camelot

Level 9

58,599 points

Jul 7, 2007 11:42 AM in response to bmnave

IPMP is pretty much Solaris-specific, but you can obtain similar results using link aggregation - the main difference is that in IPMP you have a primary interface and one or more secondary interfaces that are used if the primary link fails, and in link aggregation traffic is spread across all active links.
In IPMP the secondary devices could be different speeds, media, or even uplinked to different switches wheras link aggregation requires the interfaces to be of the same speed and connect to the same switch.

You can use either System Preferences -> Network to create a new link aggregate, or use networksetup -createBond to do it via the command line.

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