regarding etherchannel pros and cons

[menash]

etherchannel sounds like a feature that you would always want to be enabled, but im having difficulties to believe there arent any downsides to using it, but i couldnt find any online searching google.

aside "wasting" additional ports that could be used for access hosts, what are the cons of using etherchannel? should i always opt to using etherchannl across core\distribution layers of my network topology?

[balaji.bandi · Accepted solution]

I see more advantage than disadvantage here.

1. you have resilance if one of the port go down, other one still able to serve as it is.

2. Provides Redundancy & Instantaneous failover if a line/port does down

3. Some time you have hardware limitation, like you need 4 GB Uplink speed, you not required to have 10GB ports, rather wasting them you can use lower ports to Port-channel them for the requirement.

Cons - Limitation only on maximum ports, you can not mix the ports

make sense ?

[Leo Laohoo]

If the etherchannel is configured properly, there is no "cons" to consider.  

[Martin L]

yes, you may have some "wasting" of ports but 1. you use fiber optic up-stream ports which are never used for access. and 2. you could use stacking technology (cisco stackwise) to remedy this.

Big plus of etherchannels is redundancy; very often we had tech sent over to replace 1 of 2 fiber links after one went down.

Another type of redundancy is used in stackwise switch setup where one link of etherchannel is connecting switch 1 while 2nd link goes to switch 2. In case when one of those switches gets stuck on power loss or fails completely; you still have the other one working providing some sort of connection to part of network.  

Regards, ML
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