Etherchannel or Port Channel

[sushil]

Hi,

I am using 3560.IP rouitng is being turned off on this.

Curious to know if I will create etherchannel or port channel.

I think etherchannel.Correct me if I am wrong.

On connecting switches I have vlan10,20,30 to be allowed.

I am sure I need to allow these all vlan in 10,20,30 which are on the trunk port on each side switch.

Post that will add channel-port lacp and make it in active mode.Is that correct.

This way traffic will be load-balanced/aggregated on minimum 2 ports who are the part of this.

Looking for expert opinion if I am doing it correct or not?

Regards,

Sushil

[majed.balsharaf]

Hi Sushil

We create etherchannel when we are having redundant link,means when we are running STP or RSTP that time we need to create etherchannel.

Regards,

Majed Balsharaf

[Mukti chandwani]

Hi Sushil.

etherchannel is the bundle itself of using for example 3 physical ports as 1 logical interface known as a port-channel

Technically etherchannal and port channal are one on the same thing.Cisco just likes to be confusing. NX-OS uses "port-channel" exclusively.

you need to use the exact same config  on interface port channal that you have on your physical  trunk ports .For example if you have gig0/1 amd gig0/2  on which you want to distribute load ,you would configure

int gig0/1

switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q

switchport mode trunk

switchport trunk alowed vlan 10,20,30

channal-group 1 mode active

channal-protocol lacp

int gig0/2

switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q

switchport mode trunk

switchport trunk alowed vlan 10,20,30

channal-group 1 mode active

channal-protocol lacp

int po1

switchport mode trunk

switchport trunk allowed vlan 10,20,30

once thats done ,you can verify bundling by

"show etherchannal summary"

after that if you want to add any other vlan in future on this trunk ,you can just go to interface po1 and add there and it will automatically push it to physical interfaces gig0/1 and gig0/2.

This way traffic will be not be exact load balanced but will be  distributed.Load balancing depends on algorithm that lacp runs based on different critieris like source-desip,source-dest ports ,mad address..load distribution  is still proportional to the volume of traffic passing between pairs of hosts or link indexes

Refer the link below for more information

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

HTH

regards,

Mukti