On any given Catalyst Center appliance, you can configure the Enterprise, Intracluster, Management, and Internet interface. If you enable network interface controller (NIC) bonding on an appliance, each of these interfaces has two instances: The primary instance (located on either your appliance's motherboard or Intel X710-DA2 NIC) is connected to one switch, and the secondary instance (located on your appliance's Intel X710-DA4 NIC) is connected to a different switch. NIC bonding consolidates the two instances of each interface into a single logical interface, appearing as a single device with one MAC address. Depending on the bonding mode that you choose when configuring the interfaces on your appliance, this feature provides the following benefits when enabled:

Note

Both single-node and three-node Catalyst Center clusters support NIC bonding.

• Active-Backup mode: By default, this is the bonding mode that's configured for your appliance's interfaces when this feature is enabled on your appliance. It enables high availability (HA) for the two interfaces that Catalyst Center has grouped together. When the interface that's currently active goes down, the other interface takes its place and becomes active.

  Note

  When this mode is enabled on an interface that supports both 1-Gbps and 10-Gbps throughput, Catalyst Center automatically sets the throughput to 1-Gbps.

• LACP mode: When selected, the two interfaces that Catalyst Center has grouped together share the same speed and duplex settings. This provides load balancing and higher bandwidth for the interfaces. In order to enable this mode, the following items must first be in place:

  • The Linux utility ethtool must support the base drivers that are used to retrieve the speed and duplex mode of each interface.

  • The switch that is connected to the Enterprise port must support dynamic interface aggregation.

  • After you enable LACP on the switch, ensure that you have set the LACP mode to active (which places the switch port connected to your appliance into an active negotiating state, in which the port initiates negotiations with remote ports by sending LACP packets) and the LACP rate to fast (which changes the rate at which the LACP control packets are sent to an LACP-supported interface from the default every 30 seconds to once every second).

  Note

  • You can only enable LACP mode on your appliance's Enterprise and Intracluster interfaces. The Management and Internet Access interfaces only support Active-Backup mode.

  • You can only enable LACP mode on your appliance's Intracluster interface during the initial configuration of your appliance.

Before you use NIC bonding in your production environment, you should do the following:

• Confirm that your appliance supports this feature. See Appliance support.

• Determine where the secondary ports are located on your appliance's rear panel. See Front and rear panels.

• View the recommended appliance–switch cabling. See Interface cable connections.