Sun Trunking


The Sun Trunking software is an unbundled product from Sun Microsystems ”that is, it is not supplied with the Solaris 9 operating environment and must be purchased separately. Sun Trunking allows you to

  • Aggregate up to two Sun Quad FastEthernet (qfe) cards (each having four 100Mbps network interfaces) to produce a fat network pipe running at 800Mbps, in full-duplex mode (concurrent bi-directional communication). If a specific network interface fails, then the remaining interfaces continue to operate , taking the additional load from the failed interface.

  • Aggregate up to two Sun Gigabit Ethernet (ge) cards to produce a fat network pipe running at 2Gbps, in full-duplex mode, between a Sun server and a switch that is Sun Trunking “compatible. If one of the network interfaces fails, then the remaining interface continues to operate, taking the additional load from the failed interface.

Basically, Sun Trunking enables you to combine up to eight 100Mbps network interfaces to act as if you had installed a single 800Mbps network interface, or two Sun gigabit interfaces as if you had installed a single 2Gb network interface. Figure 5.1 shows a server with a traditional 100Mbps network interface connecting to a switch, serving a number of clients , and a server utilizing Sun Trunking connecting to a switch, serving a number of clients at a greatly increased throughput rate.

Figure 5.1. Increased network throughput using Sun Trunking.

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A restriction of Sun Trunking with a Quad Fast Ethernet (qfe) card is that the network interfaces cannot be used to boot from the network, to use JumpStart for example.


A further feature of Sun Trunking is that it supports load balancing across the physical interfaces that make up the trunk, or fat pipe. It distributes the network traffic, however, according to a trunking policy, an algorithm that determines the transmission path ”a policy is selected by the system administrator when trunking is configured. Sun Trunking supports four trunking policies: MAC, Round robin , IP destination, and IP source/IP destination.

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Sun Trunking supports load balancing on outbound traffic only. There is no load balancing on inbound traffic.


MAC

This is the default policy used for Sun Trunking and the preferred one to use when the interfaces connect to a switch. Remember that the switch must be capable of supporting trunking. This policy uses the last three bits of both the source and destination ethernet addresses to ensure the data is evenly distributed across the available physical interfaces. This policy is the best to use when a large number of clients is being supported.

Round Robin

This policy uses each physical interface of the trunk, in turn , to evenly distribute the traffic. It is the preferred policy to use when a server is connected to another server (that is, not through a switch), which is also known as a back-to-back configuration. This policy is ideal for data warehousing, where large amounts of data are transferred between servers, and also for backup servers, where a fast connection is required to back up a number of servers to a central backup server.

IP Destination

This policy uses the four bytes of the destination IP address to determine which physical interface is used for transmission. It is the preferred policy to use when a server has multiple clients that are connected to the same router.

IP Source/IP Destination

This policy is the preferred policy to use if the system is part of a cluster ”for example, where multiple logical (or virtual) interfaces are used for a physical interface. The policy uses the four bytes of both the source and destination IP addresses to determine which physical interface is used for transmission. If a failure occurs on a given interface, the logical IP address will failover to a physical interface on a different system in the cluster, providing much higher availability.



Solaris 9 Network Administration Exam Cram 2 (Exam Cram CX-310-044)
Solaris 9 Network Administrator Exam Cram 2 (Exam CX-310-044)
ISBN: 0789728702
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 174
Authors: John Philcox

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