Tag Archives: NIC bonding

CLI, Networking, OS

proxmox openvswitch bond

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Recently I had to switch my Proxmox server which was using Linux bonds to using openvswitch. These are my notes:

Install openvswitch:

apt install openvswitch-switch

Configure openvswitch to bond interfaces and use VLANs using https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Open_vSwitch as an example:

allow-vmbr0 bond0
iface bond0 inet manual
	ovs_bonds enp4s0f0 eno1
	ovs_type OVSBond
	ovs_bridge vmbr0
	ovs_options bond_mode=active-backup

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

iface eno1 inet manual

iface enp4s0f0 inet manual

allow-ovs vmbr0
iface vmbr0 inet manual
	ovs_type OVSBridge
	ovs_ports bond0 vlan50 vlan10

#Proxmox communication
allow-vmbr0 vlan50
iface vlan50 inet static
  ovs_type OVSIntPort
  ovs_bridge vmbr0
  ovs_options tag=50
  ovs_extra set interface ${IFACE} external-ids:iface-id=$(hostname -s)-${IFACE}-vif
  address 10.0.50.2
  netmask 255.255.255.0
  gateway 10.0.50.1

#Storage network
allow-vmbr0 vlan10
iface vlan10 inet static
  ovs_type OVSIntPort
  ovs_bridge vmbr0
  ovs_options tag=10
  ovs_extra set interface ${IFACE} external-ids:iface-id=$(hostname -s)-${IFACE}-vif
  address 192.168.10.2
  netmask 255.255.255.0

List active interface:

OPENVSWITCH – Playing with Bonding on Openvswitch

ovs-appctl bond/show bond0

Update 3/14/2020

I realized that openvswitch won’t fail back over to the original slave once it comes back online. I couldn’t for the life of me find the equivalent of bond-primary syntax for openvswitch; however I did find this command:

ovs-appctl list-commands

which reveals this command:

bond/set-active-slave port slave

So you can manually fallback using this command:

ovs-appctl bond/set-active-slave bond0 enp4s0f1

Hardware, Networking, OS

proxmox bond not present fix

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I really banged my head on the wall on this one. I recently decided to re-architect my networking setup in proxmox to utilize bonded network configuration. I followed this writeup exactly. The problem is it didn’t work.

I would copy the example exactly, only changing the interface name, and yet every time I tried to start the networking service I would get this lovely error:

rawdevice bond0 not present

I finally found on the Debian Wiki one critical line :

First install the ifenslave package, necessary to enable bonding

For some reason the ProxMox howtos don’t speak of this – I guess because it comes installed by default. I discovered, however, that if you install ifupdown2 it removes ifenslave. I had installed ifupdown2 in the past to reload network configuration without rebooting. Aha!

I re-installed ifenslave (which removed ifupdown2 and re-installed ifupdown) and suddenly, the bond worked!

Bond not falling back to primary intrerface

I had configured my bond in active – backup mode. I wanted it to prefer the faster link, but if there was a failure in that link it wouldn’t switch back automatically (thanks to this site for showing me the command to check: 

cat /proc/net/bonding/bond0

I read again in Debian bonding wiki that I needed to add this directive to the bond:

        bond-primary enp2s0

Here is my complete working active-backup configuration, assigning vlan 2 to the host, and making enp2s0 (the 10gig nic) the primary, with a 1gig backup (eno1)

auto bond0
iface bond0 inet manual
        slaves enp2s0 eno1
        bond-primary enp2s0
        bond_miimon 100
        bond_mode active-backup

iface bond0.2 inet manual

auto vmbr0v2
iface vmbr0v2 inet static
        address 192.168.2.2
        netmask 255.255.255.0
        gateway 192.168.2.1
        bridge_ports bond0.2
        bridge_stp off
        bridge_fd 0

auto vmbr0
iface vmbr0 inet manual
        bridge_ports bond0
        brideg_stp off
        bridge_fd 0