# Network Bonding

Network bonding is the combining of multiple network adapters into a single logical interface. This is done to build in redundancy and to increase throughput. Network bonds are configured at the operating system level and there are multiple types of network bonds depending on hardware support and other factors.

In the scenarios described in the following sections, we will call out two types of network bonds that are effective for virtualization (active-backup and LACP) and show them in example configurations. VMware LBT bonds are also shown in the table below for the sake of comparison, though only the other two have been utilized in verified scenarios.

Once established, we can later offer up these bonded interfaces as a compute network (for virtual machine traffic) or storage network (for interacting with external storage) when creating our cluster within the VM Essentials manager.

![](https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/api/document/sd00007332en_us/GUID-3959336C-7ECD-49B7-85FC-62198924DE79-high.png)
