IPMP ON SOLARIS 10

WHAT IS IP MULTIPATHING?

 IPMP is a facility provided by Solaris to provide fault tolerance and load spreading for Network Interface Card ( NIC ) . With IPMP two or more NIC’s are dedicated for each other to which host connects.

TYPE’s of Multipathing:

1. Probe Base IP Multipathing

2. Link Base IP Multipathing

Probe Base Multipathing:

The probe base send ICMP messages incase of failure detection

In this example we took 2 physical Ip’s and 1 virtual IP. If one of the ip is dead, we still have virtual IP.

Setting up 2 interfaces with 3 IP’s

# vi /etc/hosts

127.0.0.1 localhost

192.168.9.79 sun1

192.168.9.80 sun1-e1000g0

192.168.9.81 sun1-e1000g1

Save and quit.

# vi /etc/netmasks

192.168.9.0 255.255.255.0

save and quit.

# vi /etc/hostname.e1000g0

sun1 netmask + broadcast + group ipmp0 up \

addif sun1-e1000g0 deprecated – failover netmask + broadcast + up

Save and quit

# vi /etc/hostname.e1000g1

sun1-e1000g1 deprecated – failover netmask + broadcast + group ipmp0 up

Save and quit.

# reboot

Link Base Multipathing:

The link base method is the fastest method of both. Whenever the link goes down, the IPMP gets a notification of the state change of the interface immediately. So it can react instantaneously on such failures.

For link base example I have used 2 Physical NIc with 1 IP.

# vi /etc/hosts

127.0.0.1 localhost

192.168.9.90 sun2

save and quit

# vi /etc/hostname.e1000g0

sun2 netmask + broadcast + group ipmp0 up

Save and quit.

# vi /etc/hostname.e1000g1

group ipmp0 up

Save and quit.

# reboot