Channel bonding / HP switch question

R C zarquon at zarq.dhs.org
Thu Mar 1 17:01:20 PST 2001


Hello, I have searched the list archives for an answer to my problem, and
had no luck, so I decided to ask directly.

I'm working on a small scale beowulf cluster, and am trying to get channel
bonding functional, and am running into problems with the switch.

The problem seems to be that the HP switch we are using, a Procurve 4000M,
does not support duplicate MAC addresses, even on separate VLANs.  It
does support several trunking techniques (Cisco Fast EtherChannel, 
Source Address Trunking, and Source Address / Destination Address trunking).

This of course means no channel bonding as is, and the other trunking 
techniques above limit the peak throughput between individual nodes (they
do allow more bandwidth between multiple nodes, but all traffic between
a specific pair uses the same link).

So my question is, how difficult would it be to change channel bonding
to function with multiple MAC addresses?  Has anyone looked into this
before?  I realize this vastly increases the configuration required for
channel bonding (MAC address/IP/Interface mapping).  

Thanks,
Robert Cicconetti




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