Fore!Stray shots from Dave Miner |
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Following on from my last entry about IPMP, we've now published for review a design document for new IPMP architecture to the OpenSolaris Networking community. If you're interested in reading about or, more importantly, influencing how IPMP will be evolving, here's your chance.
Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris
Technorati Tag: Solaris
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While discussing some examples of unapproachable features in Solaris today, one of our luminaries (who shall remain nameless so as not to dim his luminosity ;-) was noting how customers wouldn't use IP multipathing (IPMP) because of its requirement for additional, dedicated IP addresses to probe the network and detect failures. I pointed out that this is actually no longer true, as we implemented RFE 4840370 in Solaris 10. He hadn't heard about that, and I suspect most everyone else hasn't, either, since it didn't make it into the Solaris 10 What's New book. Here's what we should have said in that book:
"The use of a dedicated test address for IP multipathing groups is no longer required as of Solaris 10. When test addresses are not configured on the interfaces assigned to a group, IP multipathing will detect interface failures solely by monitoring the IFF_RUNNING flag for each network interface. This requires that the network interface driver support link status notification, which is true of most recent network drivers in Solaris. For further information, see in.mpathd(1M) and the System Administration Guide: IP Services."
The end result is that IPMP can be done "on the cheap" if you only care to passively monitor the link status from the driver; if you want to do active monitoring using ICMP probes, it'll still cost you a test address dedicated to each network interface. Note, though, that in.mpathd can use IPv6 link-local addresses for this purpose, one small reason to think about getting to know IPv6.
My buddy meem the code minimalist was the implementor of this feature. Perhaps he'll see fit to talk about the details at some point.
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