What I have done many times and what works quite well is the following scenario:
1 NIC connected to a bridge and then N VMs connected to the network via that bridge (on Ubuntu 10.4).
My newest server now has 2 NICs and I thought I do the same and in addition simply add the second NIC to the same physical LAN and to the bridge (using bridge_ports eth0 eth1); hopefully getting redundancy and higher throughput. This does not seem to work very well. Network traffic is extremely unstable irrespective of network load. Even my ssh session keeps dropping out and reconnecting all the time.
Now my questions:
- Should my approach basically work or am I doing something wrong? E.g. fundamentally misunderstanding what bridges can do with 2 NICs?
- I read that there is also NIC bonding that can combine two NICs. Does this have a higher chance of working? And if yes would I then still add a bridge to the bond and the VMs to the bridge?
For reference my /etc/network/interfaces:
# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).
# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
# The primary network interface
auto br0
iface br0 inet dhcp
bridge_ports eth0 eth1
Note: This question is the same as this one on server fault. Since it got no answers and I am using Ubuntu I hope to have more luck here.
Thanks, Carsten