NIC bonding (or NIC teaming) is used to aggregate the link to increase the throughput and provide the redundancy. On our Dell servers running Redhat Linux and Centos, we do NIC bonding on the first two embedded NICs: em1 and em2 (read the new Network Interface naming convention).
To enable NIC bonding, first you will need to load the kernel module by creating a file /etc/modprobe.d/bonding.conf
alias bond0 bonding
Traditionally Linux uses name ethX for the network interfaces. Unfortunately, the "X" is non-deterministic and the ethX names have no correlation to the chassis labels. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 introduces biosdevname, an optional convention for naming network interfaces. biosdevname assigns names to network interfaces based on their physical location.
We have got mostly RedHat RHEL5 and CentOS 5 servers in this data center. Recently there is a need to have a Debian Lenny and Ubuntu Lucid Lynx installation for some temperary projects. Instead of setting up two new machines, it makes more sense to create two virtual Xen servers.
Installing Debian Lenny xen guest is a relatively easy task. All you need to do is to use the virt-install command that is from the python-virtinst package: