Network Teaming - LACP on EL8 with Network Manager

I've already written this article for EL7 and it has been fairly popular so here it is for EL8.

First of all, what is teaming?

Teaming or LACP (802.3ad) is a technique used to bond together multiple interfaces to achieve higher combined bandwidth. NOTE: every client's speed can only be as high as the single link speed of one of the members. That means, if the interfaces I use in the bond have 1 Gigabit, every client will only have a maximum speed of 1 Gigabit. The advantage of teaming is, that it can handle multiple connections with 1 Gigabit. How many connections depend on the number of your network cards.

I'm using 2 network cards for this team on my server. That means I can handle 2 Gigabit connections at full rate on my server provided the rest of the hardware can deliver that speed.

With EL8, there's really only the Network Manager method I would recommend since the network scripts are being deprecated. Also, I'm not going to cover ansible.

First, create the teaming interface:

 [archy@server ~]$ sudo nmcli connection add type team con-name team0 ifname team0 config '{"runner": {"name": "lacp"}}'  

Then create the teaming slaves:

 [archy@server ~]$ sudo nmcli connection add type team-slave con-name team0-eno1 ifname eno1 master team0  
 [archy@server ~]$ sudo nmcli connection add type team-slave con-name team0-eno2 ifname eno2 master team0  

If the teaming interface is not already up, you can activate it using these commands:

 [archy@server ~]$ sudo nmcli connection up team0  
 [archy@server ~]$ sudo nmcli connection up team0-eno1  
 [archy@server ~]$ sudo nmcli connection up team0-eno2  

This concludes the teaming setup on EL8 assuming your switch is set up correctly.

Feel free to comment and / or suggest a topic