Basic Requirements of IPMP

IPMP is built into the Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS) and does not require any special hardware. Any interface that is supported by the Solaris OS can be used with IPMP. However, IPMP does impose the following requirements on your network configuration and topology:

• All interfaces in an IPMP group must have unique MAC addresses.

  Note that by default, the network interfaces on SPARC based systems all share a single MAC address. Thus, you must explicitly change the default in order to use IPMP on SPARC based systems. For more information, refer to How to Plan for an IPMP Group.

• All interfaces in an IPMP group must be of the same media type. For more information, refer to IPMP Group.

• All interfaces in an IPMP group must be on the same IP link. For more information, refer to IPMP Group.

• Depending on your failure detection requirements, you might need to either use specific types of network interfaces or configure additional IP addresses on each network interface. Refer to Link-Based Failure Detection and Probe-Based Failure Detection.