Dual Network Cards on Cloverleaf Server?

We have two hosts with 2 nics on each of our boxes.

We have 6 ip addresses, one for each card and two

floating addresses.

One floating address points to ie-test-if and the other one points to ie-prod-if.

The unix admins move the two ip addresses between the boxes depending on which box is test and which one is prod. Occassionally we will have both floaters on the same box.

My expereince is that inbound traffic to cloverleaf on 2 different IPs/NICs works just fine.

However, outbound traffic from cloverleaf using 2 different IPs/NICs presents a problem especially if firewalls are invloved.

The outbound traffic from the cloverleaf AIX server in my experience always ends up using the IP/NIC that the default gateway is assigned to (“netstat -rn” and “netstat -in” are commands I’ve used to see the IP/NIC mappings).

I have accomplished what you are describing by dividing the AIX server into LPARs and each of the LPARs has its own IP.

I would like to point out that the cloverleaf license key is tied to the physical host ID displayed by running hcihostid which is the same for all LPARs on the same physical AIX server.

In other words one cloverleaf license will run as many LPARs as you have resources for on one physical AIX server.

I have also been able to tie multiple NIC cards together to one IP address using ehter-channel which isn’t what you want to do but is worth knowing about as a way to load balance traffic across multiple NICs that share one common IP.