Is it possible to set up the same VLANs on two different switches with same IPs, but different MACs on dual port network cards? In case switch 1 is down or needs maintenance I would like switch 2 to take over the communication and vice versa as I do not want the entire network of devices to have no connectivity and make the network highly available. The whole purpose of my network is replicas and shards of the same app data distributed to make it fail safe, but the network is not fail salve in my engineering plan, yet. Best method to achieve assuming both switches are not connected, but each server is connected to both switches at the same time from different ports on their network cards? Switch used, if matters - Quanta LB6M.
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2Yes, that's very common. There's a bit more to a redundant network though, especially a redundant core layer. Host configurations are off-topic here, however. You could try on Server Fault for an on-topic server setup (check their help page first), or on Super User otherwise.– Zac67 ♦Commented May 30, 2021 at 9:59
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OK. Thanks a lot! Thought it is here - the place to ask.– lionCommented May 31, 2021 at 10:57
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Posted on serverfault as suggested. Let's see what other pros could suggest. serverfault.com/questions/1065195/… It is explained in more details in that question.– lionCommented May 31, 2021 at 14:21
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1 Answer
A good way to narrow your options (as @Zac67 alludes) is to decide whether your application / servers are able to be aware of the servers being multi-homed, e.g. with each server having multiple IP addresses; or if that is unsupported by the use-case.
Link Aggregation is the simplest way to provide redundant downlinks to servers and can reduce outages (MTBF) and make recovery much faster (MTTR). This doesn't require any application-awareness.
I suggest you read about MLAG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-chassis_link_aggregation_group which I think is supported by your switch.
Also, consider more featureful switches as you invest in network redundancy. At small scale, white box switches are a terrible value proposition compared to featureful, well-supported major-brand switches.
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Thank you! Will check what switches I can get. Any you could recommend?– lionCommented May 31, 2021 at 11:01
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With a small setup (just two switches, non-fat tree, ...), you'd likely want an active/passive failover - with LAG, traffic is distributed across links which may not be desired (might overstress the inter-switch links), and a passive standby NIC teaming might be more desirable (and also doesn't require MLAG).– Zac67 ♦Commented May 31, 2021 at 12:38
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Thank you, @Zac67. I am still researching options as it is the first time I will be doing this kind of network redundancy.– lionCommented May 31, 2021 at 14:20