Oracle VM’s architecture provides the same native bonding module that is found in all Enterprise Linux 5.x distributions. Although bonding has several different modes which include modes such as the round robin policy and load balancing policy, the active-backup policy (mode 1) is the preferred mode for Oracle RAC interconnects. The active-backup policy has only one active slave and the remaining are passive slaves. One of the other slaves will become active, if and only if, there is a failure with the current active slave within the bond.

In order to setup bonding within the OVM environment, the first step is to stop any guest VMs that are currently running. Once you have stopped all guest VMs, you must stop all network bridges within your OVM environment using the following command

/etc/xen/scripts/./network-bridges stop
 
The network-bridges script controls the creation of your network bridges for each physical NIC. The default behavior of OVM is to create a xen bridge for each physical NIC.
In the following example, we will start configuring our bond0 device and enslave two NIC adapters (eth1 and eth2) to our bond device.

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