Nic Bonding in Ubuntu with VirtualBox

I recently needed to setup nic bonding in Virtualbox to demo software intended to be deployed in a nic bonded environment.

When doing this in VirtualBox, one needs to activiate the bond-fail-over-mac parameter to prevent issues with host-to-vm communication.

Here's the VirtualbBox network config:

Name:            node1
Guest OS:        Ubuntu (64 bit)
UUID:            cc550cfd-60b9-427c-b09d-0a2e0dad932b
NIC 1:           MAC: 08002760454A, Attachment: Host-only Interface 'vboxnet0'
NIC 2:           MAC: 080027A206C5, Attachment: Host-only Interface 'vboxnet0'

Here is the Ubuntu config in /etc/network/interfaces. Notice the bond-fail-over-mac flag. This will ensure that only one of the nic slaves is assigned the bond0 mac address at a given time, thus resolving any host-to-vm routing issues.

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# Physical interface 0
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet manual
bond-master bond0
bond-primary eth0

# Physical interface 1
auto eth1
iface eth1 inet manual
bond-master bond0

# Bond interface 0: eth0 (vboxnet0), eth2 (vboxnet0)
auto bond0
iface bond0 inet static
bond-slaves none
bond-mode active-backup
bond-miimon 100
bond-downdelay 200
bond-updelay 200
bond-fail-over-mac 1
address 192.168.56.56
netmask 255.255.255.0

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