I know bonding modes, I know about balance-rr and 802.3ad. Both provide fault tolerance and some how increase the link throughput.
My question is when we can use balance-rr without any need to switch support why anyone should ever want to use 802.3ad??
The main difference is that the MAC address cache in the switch is constantly changed in balance-rr, as the switch is made to believe that the host constantly moves between the two interfaces. This might overload the switch, resulting in inferior performance.
Also, incoming traffic will not be fully balanced, so that you only achieve tolerance against failures, but not the double bandwidth. This is especially noticeable if the host receives a lot of large packets but only occasionally sends replies: The bandwidth is not shared, but just switched forth and back between the two ports.
