Ethernet Bonding Fail-over, How it Works

Two Ethernet interfaces on the MX-ONE Service Node are aggregated to work together on Ethernet level. It is seen by the applications as one interface.

The type of Ethernet bonding used in MX-ONE is active/backup. Only one interface is active at a time. Nothing will be sent from the backup interface. Both interfaces will use the same MAC and IP address.

The active interface will supervise the defined ARP IP Targets, if connection is lost the communication will fail-over to the other interface. Ethernet frames could be lost in the time passing between the fault happens until the fault is discovered and the fail-over is ready. The missing frames are normally resent by the IP protocols used by the applications (SCTP and TCP).