I need a better underststanding of Fast etherchannel

[greese]

I have a Cisco Catalyst 2948G switch. My servers have dual intel nics that are capable of running as an FEC team. I think i have everything setup right. The intel software says the nics are running as an FEC team, but the properties say it is running at 100mbps. Shouldn't it be 200mbps?

I did run the command set port channel on and the two ports i am using for these nics.

What should i be seeing with this in place? I don't really havea firm grasp on what it is exactly i am gainng by teaming my nics. I thought it was speed and redunancy.

I am new to dealing with these things and appreciate any pointers you may have.

Thanks!

Greg

 

[baddos]

Etherchannel loadbalancing default to source/destination loadbalancing. It doesn't do per-packet load balancing, so you will never see 200Mb.

If you only have one other host connecting to the server, etherchannel will only give you redundancy without any more speed. However, if you have more than one host connecting to this server then you'll see the benefits.

 

[greese]

So it's a bigger 100mbps connection and not really a faster one from a pure speed standpoint.

I have my database servers, terminal servers, file servers etc setup this way.

So it is normal to see the speed reported by Windows as 100mbps. Good to know.

Thanks!

greg

 

[baddos]

Yeah... It's way fast under load, but if it's only one client pulling a big file or something you won't see anything better than 100mb.