Fast EtherChannel 1

[netwalker1]

Please , I want Information about Fast EtherChannel
I want to understand the technology ,
If anyone have sites or any further information ,, please send it to me..
I want to understand it ,

Thanx,

 

[hexn]

FastEtherchannel.

Not too hard to understand. It is simply taking multiple ethernet ports (say 3 of them) and making them act as a single link. So for example you would have one 300Mbps link. Also, if one link of the etherchannel fails, then the other links simply pick up the extra traffic so that you have perfect redundancy.

Go to cisco.com and just do a search for etherchannel and you will get ALOT of documentation. The white papers will explain the technology best, and the other docs will tell you the commands to implement it.

 

[Kekoa]

On that same note Shnypr, how exactly does the "load balancing" on etherchannel work? Or do they load balance at all? If they are load balancing, then in theory, if you look at your two etherchannel ports, shouldn't you have the same or close to the same amount of traffic on the grouped ports? Example, we have two gig ports channeled, when I look at the counters, they are clearly not pushing the same amount of data. Or am I not understanding the load balancing theory correctly? Thanks for your help

 

[hexn]

Etherchannel is funny how it load balances. It assigns traffic to a link according to its source mac address. So in a sense, it doesnt actually do load balancing, except that it will divide the traffic depending on its source address. So if you only had to computers on your LAN, and one was pushing 500 Mbps, and the other was pushing 1Mbps, then your etherchannel would be very unbalanced because they would each be assigned to different links within the etherchannel.

You can read more about it:

http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/cc/techno/media/lan/ether/channel/prodlit/faste_an.htm

Just go to the section marked "Link Determination"

 

[Kekoa]

ahhhh Big help Shnyper!!!! Thanks a lot!!!

 

[Jsteve]

When I first read about EtherChannel I thought wow!! the end of bottlenecks. But after reading a litle of the link given by shnypr, I was disapointed with method of load balancing. It doesn't seem to optimize the bandwidth by using the and function of the last two bits of the source and destination Mac addresses to determine what link to transfer on.