How to do Ethernet/NIC bonding/teaming in Red Hat Linux

NICteaming/bonding is used mostly in scenarios where you cannot afford to loose connectivity due to ethernet failover issues and also it has many other advantages like to distribute bandwidth, fault tolerance etc

Let us start with the configuration steps
Make sure you have two(at least) physical Ethernet cards in your Linux machine.

Edit the configuration files of both the Ethernet cards with the options as shown below
# less /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
DEVICE=eth0
MASTER=bond0
USERCTL=no
SLAVE=yes
BOOTPROTO=none
TYPE=Ethernet
ONBOOT=yes
# less /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1
DEVICE=eth1
TYPE=Ethernet
ONBOOT=yes
BOOTPROTO=none
MASTER=bond0
SLAVE=yes
USERCTL=no
Create a new file inside /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bond0 with the parameters as shown below
# less /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bond0
DEVICE=bond0
IPADDR=192.168.0.100
NETWORK=192.168.0.1
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
USERCTL=no
BOOTPROTO=none
ONBOOT=yes
# vi /etc/modprobe.conf
alias bond0 bonding
options bond0 mode=1 miimon=100

mode=0 : Load Balancing
mode=1 : Fault Tolerance
balance-rr: Frames are transmitted in a round-robin fashion without hashing, to truly load balance.

802.3ad: This mode is the official standard for link aggregation, and includes many configurable options for how to balance the traffic.

balance-xor: Traffic is hashed and balanced according to the receiver on the other end. This mode is also available as part of 802.3ad.

broadcast: This mode is not really link aggregation - it simply broadcasts all traffic out both interfaces, which can be useful when sending data to partitioned broadcast domains for high availability. If using broadcast mode on a single network, switch support is recommended.

balance-tlb: Outgoing traffic is load balanced, but incoming only uses a single interface. The driver will change the MAC address on the NIC when sending, but incoming always remains the same.

balance-alb: Both sending and receiving frames are load balanced using the change MAC address trick.