etherchannel and cisco swicth

[polani]

Guys

I have setup a etherchannel on VIO 1.5 server .This contains four physical adapters, three of which are forming link aggregasion while fourth one being used as a backup adapter ( all four however connected to same CISCO core switch)

Every thing works ok , except two things

1. First as alll of these adapters are giga bit , so i should get atleast 3 GB network pipeline on VIO as well as on client lpars.. but how to verify or check this belief?

2. Second, my network admin is saying that on cisco switch level , he is getting some duplicate mac addresses...
He is also of the view that something has to be configured on cisco switch level to support etherchannel setup on VIO server...but i am not sure ... as for simple AIX level , etherchanneling has to be done on AIX level , nothing required to be configured on switch level?
Should i allow him to create a so called " port trunk " on swich level ( on ports whcih are part of AIX ether channel) or just changing protocol to LACP??? Please advice

Many thanks for help

Regards

Here comes polani Once again!!!

P690 Certified Specailist
HACMP & AIX Certified Specailist
AIX & HACCMP Instructor

 

[RMGBELGIUM]

What you could do is a dd through an FTP ( had a script once from AIX support that could do that ).This goes from one server to another, from memory to memory,so you should get the speed of your line.
for the etherchannel :have a look at this redbook :

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpieces/pdfs/sg247196.pdf

search on LACP,there you will find your answer I think.

rgds,

R.

 

[p5wizard]

It is my understanding that you need to create a channel group on the cisco switch in order for the etherchannel device on the VIOS to work properly.

Q: Do you have just one VIOS or is it a dual VIOS setup? ==> For dual VIOS setup, it is better to create SharedEthernetAdapter-failover configuration on etherchannel (where in this case you can have 4x1Gbit/s) with failover to similar setup on other VIOS instead of having one of the ports as backup adapter of the etherchannel. That way you don't fall back to 1Gbit/s in case the etherchannel group or the switch that's hosting it fails, but you failover to another VIOS with its own etherchannel group having a comparable bandwidth. You'd need to have two different switches with each one a channel group defined on it.

Hope I'm making sense to you.


HTH,

p5wizard

 

[DukeSSD]

Some cisco switches support etherchannel for AIX.

I found this redbook on google, search it for "cisco" for details of how to configure the switch.

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg246606.pdf

page 255 has some detail on the switch config.

the links on page 351 may provide more info, if they are not out of date by now.