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Etherchannel load-balance

Bahman
Level 1
Level 1

If a cisco 9500 switch and WLC 9800-40 have different etherchannel load balance methods, will the mismatch cause errors or performance issues? Etherchannels are configured in PAgP mode:

 

switch#show etherchannel load-balance
EtherChannel Load-Balancing Configuration:
src-dst-port

---------------------------------------

wlc#show etherchannel load-balance
EtherChannel Load-Balancing Configuration:

 

src-mac

1 Accepted Solution

Accepted Solutions

Jon Marshall
Hall of Fame
Hall of Fame

 

You shouldn't see any errors. 

 

In terms of performance it depends on which is the best method to use ie. it wouldn't matter if you used different ones as long as they are the best methods for each side of the etherchannel. 

 

Jon

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3 Replies 3

Jon Marshall
Hall of Fame
Hall of Fame

 

You shouldn't see any errors. 

 

In terms of performance it depends on which is the best method to use ie. it wouldn't matter if you used different ones as long as they are the best methods for each side of the etherchannel. 

 

Jon

Sergiu.Daniluk
VIP Alumni
VIP Alumni

Generally speaking, having a different load-balancing method on Layer 2 port-channels do not influence the performance or user traffic. However, there are situations where a mismatch can cause problems in the network. An example is when you have a transparent firewall between the two devices configured for port-channel. Here is where is important for traffic to have the same load-balancing mechanism and also a symmetric/asymmetric path (for bidirectional flow), depending on the scenario.

Some switches (like Nexus) have an option at the end of the command to change the behavior:

 switch(config)# port-channel load-balance method [asymmetric]

Cheers,

Sergiu

Joseph W. Doherty
Hall of Fame
Hall of Fame
As already noted by Jon, the Etherchannel hashing algorithm is unique to the transmitting device, i.e. it doesn't matter what the receiving device uses for it's choice (except as already noted by Jon, you want what's optimal for its data sending).

As to performance issues, again as already noted by Jon, that depends on what's "best" for the device transmitting. For example if on one side you have a server and and on the other side many hosts, the server side transmission might use dest-mac or dest-ip, and the hosts side transmission use src-mac or src-ip (generally, you're looking to avoid using the same attribute values for multiple flows). Or, both sides might use something like src-dest-mac or src-dest-ip. (NB: your WLC's default [?] of src-mac might be a suboptimal choice. The 9500's default [?] src-dest-port would probably be good for just UDP/TCP traffic.)

Between two hosts, you might look for something that uses IP UDP/IP port values too, but generally only Cisco's top line switches support that as an algorithm.

Some additional notes: a single flow will only use one link, loading is not dynamic (i.e. a busy link will not take advantage of a non-busy link) and load balancing often works out best with powers of 2 [2,4,8] number of links (although some later switches now distribute better over non-powers of 2 number of links).