Nested Bonding

[Astraea]

I am still planning my next switch upgrade and the switches that are within my budget and with the speed and # of ports that I am wanting them to have do not support any type of multi-chassis aggregation or stacking of the switches. I have tried experimenting with setting up a nested bond within the Proxmox VE WebUI but it throws an error when creating the Active/Backup bond when adding the pair of LACP bonds as slaves.

While I am aware I could modify the interfaces file from the CLI, this could introduce unwanted effects during other management/administrative tasks that I complete using the WebUI and also possible issues during Proxmox VE updates.

Should I abandon this approach and look at bonding the 4 interfaces together using LACP on the node and then LACP bonding each set of 2 on the switches? Could the WebUI be updated to allow for nested bonding?

 

[vedrandobos]

Hi. I have somewhat accomplished what you are trying to do.
I have a server with 2x 1G and 2x 10G ports, and a switch with appropriate connections. I have successfully bonded the 2x 10G into bond0 and the 2x1G into bond1 with LACP (on the switch too). Afterwards I made a new bond2 using active-backup and used bond0 and bond1 as members, setting bond0 as primary. On top of that a bridge is used with bond2 as only member.
It works. I also have vlans, so it took me some time to configure everything and go through multiple iterations. All was done through the GUI.
I have not seen this documented yet, and it might come back and bite me. We'll see.

You could perhaps also use only a bridge if every bonding fails (try balance-rr first, it should be switch-agnostic).
PVE creates a bridge with STP through the GUI automatically, so it should work.

P.S.
If you can, I strongly suggest adding another USB/PCI(e) nic (even 100mb is fine) to configure the network from, if you can.