Oracle Solaris 11 Advanced Administration Cookbook

Setting the link aggregation

As a rough comparison, we could think about link aggregation (802.3ad LACP) as a network technology layer 2 (Datalink), which acts as the inverse of IPMP (network technology layer 3: IP). While IPMP is concerned with offering network interface fault tolerance—eliminating a single point of failure and offering a higher outbound throughput as a bonus—link aggregation works as the old "trunk" product from previous versions of Oracle Solaris and offers a high throughput for the network traffic and, as a bonus, also provides a fault tolerance feature so that if a network interface fails, the traffic isn't interrupted.

Summarizing the facts:

• IPMP is recommended for fault tolerance, but it offers some output load balance
• Link ...