port channel load balance cisco 3560 Switch

[vikas kumar]

Dear All,

we have two Cisco 3560 switches are connected with Gig (Trunk) port.

Now we noticed Gig is reaching full and we need to upgrade.

i was thinking to use port channel load balance using two Gig ports on both switches.

we want Port channel will work as trunk port and traffic should flow on both ports.

Please assist.

Regards 

[Traian Bratescu]

The port-channel provides both redundancy and bandwidth increase. The load-balancing mechanism is based on source mac address which means that if you have a single machine generating a lot of traffic the port-channel won't help you.

switchr#show etherchannel load-balance
EtherChannel Load-Balancing Configuration:
        src-mac

You can change it based on destination however

switch(config)#port-channel load-balance ?
  dst-ip       Dst IP Addr
  dst-mac      Dst Mac Addr
  src-dst-ip   Src XOR Dst IP Addr
  src-dst-mac  Src XOR Dst Mac Addr
  src-ip       Src IP Addr
  src-mac      Src Mac Addr

From a configuration point of view is straight forward - just need 2 similar interfaces with similar configuration

switch(config)# interface type slot / port

switch(config)#switchport !!! I assume you want L2 interface

switch(config)#channel-group channel-number mode on

The rest of the config will be mode to the interface Pox; all the config that you apply on the aggregated interface will be propagated to the physical interface.

Traian