C4510R+E Etherchannel question

[Brian Meston]

We have a Cisco 4510 access-layer switch with a pair of Sup8-E supervisor cards.

- The cards are configured so that slot5 is the active and slot6 is the standby Sup card.

- We have a pair of 10Gig trunks from Te5/1 and Te6/1 upstream to a Nexus 7009.

- The two uplink ports are configured as an Etherchannel.

Are we getting any benefit from the Etherchannel bundle since the Sup card in slot 6 is a standby and technically not passing any traffic? Is there any harm in leaving those ports in an Etherchannel bundle?

Thanks in advance. 

Brian

[Reza Sharifi]

I think, it is good idea to have the link from the stand-by sup in the port-channel.  If for whatever reason the primary sup fails, the stand-by sup will take over and will forward traffic using the 10Gig link without any or minimum down time.

HTH

[pille1234]

The active SUP takes ownership of all uplink ports, including those on the standby SUP, therefore they do forward traffic. In fact it is best practise to utilize links from both modules.

Regards

[Brian Meston]

Thanks everyone. This is what I was thinking by intuition, but just wanted to run it by some smart people.