Bonding
One of the big performance challenge is to handle the failiure on interconnect. Network bonding greatly helps to reduce single point failiure on NIC's.
I read about 3 different kinds of Bonding, we used MODE-1 also referred as "fault-tolerance (active-backup)". The configuration parameters at OS level goes similar to the following
BONDING_MODULE_OPTS='miimon=100 mode=1 use_carrier=0'
BONDING_SLAVE0='bus-pci-0000:0a:00.0'
BONDING_SLAVE1='bus-pci-0000:0c:00.1'
It is also very important to make proper Pairing of NIC's for effective bonding.
The another mode that I am aware is round-robin "load balancing (round-robin)". And which will be default bonding option in Suse Linux.
In Linux we can do the following to check the bonding
more /proc/net/bonding/bond0
-- Need to type the appriprate bond name in the place of bond0 above.
Jumbo Frames
By default the MTU on a linux network is 1500. For a Oracle environment with 8K blocksize we can set the MTU to 9000. We can use Jumbo Frames for both the public network and the cluster interconnect. Due to specific server and network hardware requirements, jumbo frames must be thoroughly tested before implementation in a production environment.
There are some restrictions to enable Jumbo Frames
1. Jumbo Frames need to be enabled in NIC's as well as Switches. So it is preferred to have a dedicated switch for interconnects.
2. Not all the NIC's / Switches support Jumbo Frames. Need to check with the vendor and understand if bonding is feasible in that.
