Problem with bonding when running DSS V6 on Oracle/Sun VirtualBox

Article ID: 1253

Last updated: 17 May, 2011

When creating a bonding like balance-rr it's important to know that it will change the MAC address of the NICs included in the bond configuration.
For more information about bonding please refer to:
http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/networking/bonding.txt

It's importatnt to know that it is not possible to set up bonding in DSS V6 when running as a virtual machine in VirtualBox.

You can ping a network interface but when you create a bond, the MAC Address of all network interfaces included in the bond will be changed.

After that it is not possible to ping the bond interface.
The reason is that when the MAC Address is changed by DSS V6 the VirtualBox is not able to recognized the new MAC Address. 
This MAC Address is usually different that those which are visible when setting  up the virtual machine in VirtualBox.

Hopefully Oracle will be able to solve this problem in the near future.
We didn't experience the problem when using VMware solutions.