Etherchannel Load-Balancing To Host (Confused)

[Dan Man]

I'm a bit confused as to how an etherchannel load-balances traffic across all the links, in the port-channel.  If I have a 4 port etherchannel, to an AIX host, does the traffic load balance across all 4 ports?   In reading the load-balancing documentation, it states that a global configuration of src-mac forwards traffic from the same host, over the same port, all the time, whereas it forwards traffic over different ports for other hosts.  What if it's the same host tied into the port-channel?  So if my AIX box has 4 ethernet cards in a port channel, each ethernet card goes over only one link?  If the ethernet cards are bundled, into a port channel config, is there no way to load balance all the traffic?  Maybe I'm misunderstanding the etherchannel configuration and how it works.  Thanks for any and all help!!

Dan

[rfalconer.sffcu]

To have a host connected etherchannel, you need to have a server NIC that supports this function.

In your scenario, are all 4 NICs connected to a single switch? Does the server have an option for LACP or some other channeling option?

[glen.grant]

  Port channel is link aggregation for all traffic which will get distributed across all links.  A given ip conversation will only travel down one of those links at any given time. The single ip conversation is not carried say for instance across all 4 links if it's a 4 port etherchannel.