I have an interesting question for you.

I have my server with 2 onboard 1Gb NIC's and an add-in 10GB NIC configured to failover from the 10GB to the first 1gb then the 2nd 1Gb.

What I would like to know is can I safely configure the following setup?

Bond the 2 1GB into an aggregation (my switch will support this). I am assuming this would then be eth1 (with eth2 bound to it)

Then configure Eth0 as the 10gb with failover to the aggregated eth1?

I hope I have explained that clear enough.

Yes you could. Don't do it. Bonding is just terrible. It does not increase transfer speeds in the way it is often described and performance gains are with rare exception, nil. It also introduces complexities that often result in disconnects and confusion.

On 7/10/2026 at 1:48 AM, Shay McAulay said:

What I would like to know is can I safely configure the following setup?

I'll play a little devil's advocate here, because I don't think the answer to a supported feature should be "never." I run three bonded networks across my servers and haven't had an issue. It does take some extra care and usually a specific order of operations, but done correctly it works great in my experience.

As for the original question — you can't actually nest bonds like that. The bonding driver won't let a bond be a member of another bond. What you can do is put all three NICs into a single Mode 1 (active-backup) bond with the 10Gb set as primary. You would run at 10Gb normally, with both 1Gb ports as failovers behind it. Active-backup also doesn't require any switch-side config, so it's the more forgiving setup anyway.