Bonding network interfaces for redundancy

Running multiple services across multiple machines and implementing appropriate HA methods ensure a high degree of tolerance to failure within our environment. But if it's the physical network that fails and not the service, outages will occur if traffic cannot flow to and from that service. Adding in Network Interface Card (NIC) bonding (also known as teaming or link aggregation) can help alleviate these issues by ensuring traffic flows through diverse routes and switches as appropriate.

Getting ready

NIC bonding requires coordination between system administrators and the network administrators who are responsible for the switches. There are various methods available for NIC bonding. The method presented here is active-passive mode, which describes that traffic will normally flows through a single switch, leaving the other teamed NIC to take no traffic until it is required.

How to do it...

Setting up NIC bonding in Ubuntu 14.04 requires an extra...