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Bandwidth / throughput speed of Etherchannel

tarik sayel
Level 1
Level 1

Hello,

I have made an etherchannel between 6509 and 7606 with two giga interfaces on eatch one to have more bandwidth (2Go), but the Etherchannel does not exceed 1 GB (Below is a capture for Etherchannel taken from Solarwinds).

the both 6506 and 7606 use ws sup 720 3bxl

Please any help ?

Capture du 2013-06-03 23:50:14.png

2 Accepted Solutions

Accepted Solutions

Hi Tarik,

I would go with Glen on the said statement. Please Understand that Etherchannel is not loadbalancing rather its a load sharing. If you have two-1 Gig interface bundling in the same port-channel the theory saying would be that you would be getting 2 gig throuhgput and marketing terms you would be getting 4 Gig output.

Were as in practical at any given point of time you would be able to transfer only 1 Gig amount of traffic over the link as you know that the Etherchannel concept , it takes the packet does the calculation (By default src mac and dst mac) and the result of the hex vaule it selects one of the link from the bundle and traffic would be flowed across that particular link.

Ref: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk389/tk213/technologies_tech_note09186a0080094714.shtml

Please feel free to revert back for any further clarification on the same.

HTH

Regards

Inayath.

*Plz rate all usefull posts.

View solution in original post

Hi Tarik,

It will not exceed more than 1 Gig at any given point of time.  But what you can do is change the default load balancing method on the etherchannel so that the traffic gets load balance between the interfaces accordingly (not excatly 50% each) but close to it.

HTH

Regards

Inayath

View solution in original post

9 Replies 9

glen.grant
VIP Alumni
VIP Alumni

   For a given ip conversation your transfer speed will never be more than 1 gig as the conversation always flows across a single link. Thats the way etherchannel works. Nothing will change that..  Etherchannel just gives you more ports to be able to handle more ip conversations so you will have a total of 2 gig for all your conversations but any single conversation will never be more than a gig .

Hi Tarik,

I would go with Glen on the said statement. Please Understand that Etherchannel is not loadbalancing rather its a load sharing. If you have two-1 Gig interface bundling in the same port-channel the theory saying would be that you would be getting 2 gig throuhgput and marketing terms you would be getting 4 Gig output.

Were as in practical at any given point of time you would be able to transfer only 1 Gig amount of traffic over the link as you know that the Etherchannel concept , it takes the packet does the calculation (By default src mac and dst mac) and the result of the hex vaule it selects one of the link from the bundle and traffic would be flowed across that particular link.

Ref: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk389/tk213/technologies_tech_note09186a0080094714.shtml

Please feel free to revert back for any further clarification on the same.

HTH

Regards

Inayath.

*Plz rate all usefull posts.

Inayath,

PM sent.

Leo, will get back to you on this.

No problem, Inayath.

Hello,

thanks for your respond

I have more than 1 conversations (they are a lot of them), so they will be loadbalanced between the two Gig interfaces, in this case the etherchannel have to exceed the 1.2 Gig.

Best Regards

Hi Tarik,

It will not exceed more than 1 Gig at any given point of time.  But what you can do is change the default load balancing method on the etherchannel so that the traffic gets load balance between the interfaces accordingly (not excatly 50% each) but close to it.

HTH

Regards

Inayath

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Posting

As the other posters have already noted, Etherchannel sends a flow across just one link, so one flow will never obtain more than a single link's bandwidth.

Other flows, though, might be distributed between links, so your average bandwidth can exceed one link's bandwidth.  Not all switches support all the same hashing algorithms, and of those which are supported on your device are best for you depends on the nature of your traffic.  Generally, a hash that uses both source and destination IPs works well.

Even if hashing was completely random, remember there would still be the chance that multiple flows will use the same link.  For example, 1st flow uses port channel, it selects link 1.  2nd flow now has a 50/50 chance of using (for dual port channel) either link 1 or link 2.  If it chooses link 1, both flows share that link's bandwidth while all the bandwidth of link 2 goes unused.  On average, for a dual port channel because of chance using already busy link, expect about 50% more effective bandwidth, not twice the effective bandwidth.

There are other technologies which will take advantage of all link bandwidth, such as packet-by-packet link sharing (normally very much not recommended), MLPPP or OER/PfR.  Often the latter two are too slow for high bandwidth links or not supported on the platform.

Tarik,

It seems as though your question is misunderstood.  I am looking at a 4X1G port-channel configured on a 6516A. Each link averages  a little over 200 Mbps and the bandwidth graph for the port-channel never exceeds 1G.  ex:Show interface PO1 - bandwidth is 4000000 but the interface status show 1G Full duplex.     I'm going 10G  and not sure why there is a correct answer the question is about the port-channel and not about a particular flow


Port-channel1 is up, line protocol is up (connected)
   MTU 1500 bytes, BW 4000000 Kbit, DLY 10 usec,
     reliability 255/255, txload 60/255, rxload 24/255
  Full-duplex, 1000Mb/s, media type is unknown
  Members in this channel: Gi1/1 Gi1/2 Gi1/9 Gi1/10
  ARP type: ARPA, ARP Timeout 04:00:00
  Last input never, output never, output hang never
  Last clearing of "show interface" counters 00:54:21
  Input queue: 0/2000/0/0 (size/max/drops/flushes); Total output drops: 4898
   30 second input rate 391088000 bits/sec, 101600 packets/sec
  30 second output rate 950498000 bits/sec, 110813 packets/sec