IP Multipathing rethought: Clearview IPMP
Nothing is that good, that you can´t improve it. As a part of the Clearview project, the IP Multipathing in Solaris was rearchitected from the ground up to solve some design limitations of IPMP. The results of this projecte had their putback to Opensolaris 106 a few days ago:
As the project name suggests, IPMP's inner workings have been rewritten from the ground up to address numerous longstanding architectural flaws. The most visible change is that each IPMP group is now modeled as a single IP interface that hosts a set of IP addresses that are dynamically bound to a set of underlying IP interfaces.
There is a good overview in the projects documentation. (BTW: This is one of the things i like with Solaris. Good documentation is a mandatory deliverable with a new project.) New in this rearchitected IPMP:
- The system becomes responsible for the distribution of data addresses among underlying interfaces. In the actual Solaris 10 implementation it´s done by moving around virtual IP interfaces (automatically or by the administrator)
- The ipmpstat tool is introduced as the principal tool to obtain information about IPMP groups.
- The IPMP interface can be assigned a customized name to identify the IPMP group more easily within your network setup (vanity naming of interfaces).