BS450's MLT connect to ethernet channel

[m1227]

Hi all,

Anyone tried BS450's standard MLT connect to Cisco 4506's Ethernet channel ?
Is it work ?

Regards.

M1227

 

[anthonyanderberg]

I connected a Nortel 425+MLT to a Cisco 6500+Etherchannel once for fun and it worked OK. I'd expect that even if the scheme for traffic distrubution were different it should still work OK.

 

[HungryHouse]

Yes you have to use LACP to accomplish this properly.
We did this with 8600s, and it works similarly with 450 with catch being you must have it stacked to a BOSS switch (BPS/460/470) as master which has the LACP features code...just did this in lab 2 weeks ago , and without LACP the links are not stable and we found them freezing up on us quite often.
You will get it to link without LACP however we found stability problems after 30-45 minutes of activity...we did such with and without STP enabled, and still issues.
LACP is an industry standard and is the best way to go.

 

[Alainv]

I never had issues with etherchannel/mlt combinations, as long as you define everything staticly.

The only problems, we encountered were tagging issues with the native vlan. Cisco do not tagged them by default. Nortel does.

 

[Kwazzy]

Both companies have built their etherchannel/MLT off the 802.3ad standard. You should not have a problem with link.

 

[anthonyanderberg]

As Kwazzy mentions they are all similar (divide traffic based on source/desination hash, group ports for spanning tree purposes, ect, ect) so is everything should work. I've used SMLT and FastEtherchannel to hook my Cisco routers to my Nortel core for quite some time without problems.

Though as HungryHouse mentions, if both sides support LACP that's probably the best route.