IPMP in Solaris allows you to have redundancy with your network on mission critical servers. It is really excellent as it allows you to mix speed of NICs (e.g. a Ten Gigabit Ethernet with Gigabit Ethernet). Below will demonstrate the 'passive' IPMP configuration. Active mode allows you to check the ability to ping a defined host as well as the same checks of passive, but does require more extensive configuration.
NIC Setup
Stop the scary nwam service
- svcadm disable svc:/network/physical:nwam
Plumb each nic
- ifconfig NIC0 plumb
- ifconfig NIC1 plumb
Add to group
- ifconfig NIC0 group GROUPNAME
- ifconfig NIC1 group GROUPNAME
Edit /etc/hostname.interface
- Primary NIC: IP/NETMASK group GROUPNAME up
- Secondary NIC: group GROUPNAME standby
Enable traditional Solaris Networking
- svcadm enable svc:/network/physical:default
You should now be done. Have fun yanking network cables and seeing your server stay online.
Zone Setup
Once your networking is set up just set the zone up as you normally would, but use the ipmpX as your physical zone NIC in zonecfg.
- add net
- set physical=ipmpX
- end
- verify
- commit
For more zone configuration command information visit GenUnix Wiki.
