IPMP on Solaris ( 2 Physical IPs + 1 Virtual Public IP)

First time to implement IPMP on a real environment (not training) , I faced so many problems and wasted so much time , trying all the different procedures I found on the internet posted by others, and none of them worked properly. At the end I was able to achieve the required, and in this post I explain what is the configuration that worked with me , It may help others

This procedure depends on editing the files, so to make it affective, a reboot is needed.


(1) Ethernet ports:
Choose two Ethernet ports , it's preferred to have them on different controllers for redunduncy, for example : to have one of them on built-in Ethernet ports and the other, a port on a PCI card

(2) IPs:
Three IPs is needed on your subnet , 2 IP to be used on the physical ports, these IPs also called Internal , and the third IP to be used as a public IP which used by the application users.

(3) Other Network Information:
-Hostname
-Subnet netmask
-Default router , If there is any
-

(4) Preparing Information:
-Every physical interface will have :
Name : for example ; bge0 , nxge0 ,,, etc
Host-name , usually it is MachineHostName-interfacename, for example : mymachine-bge0
- IPs:
bge0 -> 192.168.20.10
nxge0 -> 192.168.20.11
Public IP -> 192.168.20.12
Netmask -> 255.255.255.0
Group -> production ( you can set the group name you want), all IPMP interfaces should belong to one IPMP group.

(5) Editing files:

root@mymachine # vi /etc/hosts

#

# Internet host table

#

::1 localhost

127.0.0.1 localhost

192.168.20.12 mymachine mymachine.mydomain.com loghost

192.168.20.11 mymachine-bge0

192.168.20.10 mymachine-nxge0

root@mymachine# vi /etc/hostname.bge0

mymachine netmask + broadcast + group production up \

addif mymachine-bge0 deprecated netmask + broadcast + -failover up

root@mymachine# vi /etc/hostname.nxge0

mymachine-nxge0 netmask + broadcast + group production deprecated up

root@mymachine# vi /etc/defaultrouter

192.168.20.1

root@mymachine#vi /etc/netmasks

#

#The netmasks file associates Internet Protocol (IP) address

#masks with IP network numbers

#

# network-number netmask

#

# The term network-number refers to a number obtained from the internet Network

# Information Center.

#

# Both the network-number and the netmasks are specified in

# "decimal dot" notation, e.g:

#

# 128.32.0.0 255.255.255.0

#

192.168.20.0 255.255.255.0