I am currently investigating channel bonding for rhel5.5.
Is there any way I can create one bond from nics on two different linux machines.They will be a cluster without any clustering software like beowulf or LVS.There will be a cluster interconnect through which they can communicate.Should I tweak the bonding module??

you could probably do it without tweaking bonding. set up two tunnels between the two, so that you have tap0 and tap1 on each machine then bond the ethernet on one to tap0 and the ethernet on the other to tap1. Once you've done that any traffic coming out the non-bonded tap interface gets sent out the ethernet interface (not the bond interface) of that machine. And if you cross the taps, so tap0 of machine 1 goes to tap1 of machine2 and vice versa then the setup will look the same on both machines (i.e. bond with tap0 and route tap1 traffic to ethernet)

1 members found this post helpful.

Will this work with high availability?
And also I want to form one bond across 2 nodes which means I will be using only one Ip address.This should not cause any conflict.And my switches do not support link aggregation.
How do I monitor the bond now?
MII or ARP?WIll this give the actual state of the IP address and the interfaces.

It shouldn't be incompatible with HA and depending on what you use for your tunnel it should bring the tap interfaces up and down automatically and you can put the in/out of the bond in the tunnel up/down scripts. Not sure on the 1 ip you could try it and see, I guess I was thinking more along the lines of redundant/balanced output as opposed to making two computers look like 1

1 members found this post helpful.