Managing bonds

You wish to ensure that any critical server has high availability access to the network.

This is a highly desirable requirement in a virtual environment. XenServer lets you achieve high network availability and create redundancy through NIC bonding, also known as NIC teaming.

Using NIC bonding, an administrator configures two physical network interfaces together so they logically function as one network card. If one NIC in the bond fails, the host's network traffic is automatically redirected through the second NIC.

XenServer supports up to eight bonded networks—you can bond network interfaces related to management and virtual machine traffic.

Bonding behavior differs depending on whether it is being configured for management interfaces (primary or dedicated to storage) or for virtual machine interfaces. When you create a bond for management interfaces, the second NIC provides only failover for the management traffic, when you create a bond dedicated to a virtual machine's traffic...