Home > EtherChannel Questions

EtherChannel Questions

November 22nd, 2019 Go to comments

Quick overview of EtherChannel:

The Port Aggregation Protocol (PAgP) and Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) facilitate the automatic creation of EtherChannels by exchanging packets between Ethernet interfaces. The Port Aggregation Protocol (PAgP) is a Cisco-proprietary solution, and the Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) is standards based.

LACP modes:

+ on: the link aggregation is forced to be formed without any LACP negotiation. A port-channel is formed only if the peer port is also in “on” mode.
+ off: disable LACP and prevent ports to form a port-channel
+ passive: the switch does not initiate the channel, but does understand incoming LACP packets
+ active: send LACP packets and willing to form a port-channel

The table below lists if an EtherChannel will be formed or not for LACP:

LACP Active Passive
Active Yes Yes
Passive Yes No

PAgP modes:

+ on: The link aggregation is forced to be formed without any PAgP negotiation. A port-channel is formed only if the peer port is also in “on” mode.
+ off: disable PAgP and prevent ports to form a port-channel
+ desirable: send PAgP packets and willing to form a port-channel
+ auto: does not start PAgP packet negotiation but responds to PAgP packets it receives

The table below lists if an EtherChannel will be formed or not for PAgP:

PAgP Desirable Auto
Desirable Yes Yes
Auto Yes No

An EtherChannel in Cisco can be defined as a Layer 2 EtherChannel or a Layer 3 EtherChannel.
+ For Layer 2 EtherChannel, physical ports are placed into an EtherChannel group. A logical port-channel interface will be created automatically. An example of configuring Layer 2 EtherChannel can be found in Question 1 in this article.

+ For Layer 3 EtherChannel, a Layer 3 Switch Virtual Interface (SVI) is created and then the physical ports are bound into this Layer 3 SVI.

For more information about EtherChannel, please read our EtherChannel tutorial.

Question 1

Explanation

The table below lists if an EtherChannel will be formed or not for LACP:

LACP Active Passive
Active Yes Yes
Passive Yes No

The table below lists if an EtherChannel will be formed or not for PAgP:

PAgP Desirable Auto
Desirable Yes Yes
Auto Yes No

To form an Etherchannel both sides must use the same Etherchannel protocol (LACP or PAgP). According the two tables above we can see only “desirable” and “auto” (of PAgP) can form an Etherchannel bundle.

Note: If we want to use “on” mode, both ends must be configured in this “on” mode to create an Etherchannel bundle.

Question 2

Explanation

To form an Etherchannel both sides must use the same Etherchannel protocol (LACP or PAgP).

Question 3

Explanation

In this case the EtherChannel bundle was configured to load-balance based on the destination IP address but there is only one web server (means one destination IP address). Therefore only one of the EtherChannel links is being utilized to reach the web server. To solve this problem we should configure load-balancing based on source IP address so that traffic to the web server would be shared among the links in the EtherChannel bundle with different hosts.

Question 4

Question 5

Explanation

If one end is passive and another end is active then the EtherChannel will be formed regardless the two interfaces in the same switch use different modes and different load-balancing method. Switch 1 will load-balance based on destination IP while Switch2 will load-balance based on source MAC address.

Question 6

Explanation

When storm control is configured on an EtherChannel, the storm control settings propagate to the EtherChannel physical interfaces. In the “show etherchannel” command output, The storm control settings appear on the EtherChannel but not on the physical port of the channel.

Note: You cannot configure storm control on the individual ports of that EtherChannel.

Reference: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/lan/catalyst2950/software/release/12-1_22ea/SCG/scg/swtrafc.html

Question 7

Explanation

Issue the port-channel load-balance {src-mac | dst-mac | src-dst-mac | src-ip | dst-ip | src-dst-ip | src-port | dst-port | src-dst-port | mpls} global configuration command in order to configure the load balancing.

Question 8

Explanation

A LACP port priority is configured on each port using LACP. The port priority can be configured automatically or through the CLI. LACP uses the port priority with the port number to form the port identifier. The port priority determines which ports should be put in standby mode when there is a hardware limitation that prevents all compatible ports from aggregating.

The syntax of LACP port priority is (configured under interface mode):

lacp port-priority priority-value

The lower the range, the more likely that the interface will be used for LACP transmission.

Reference: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/ios/12_2sb/feature/guide/gigeth.html

Question 9

Explanation

The table below lists if an EtherChannel will be formed or not for PAgP:

PAgP Desirable Auto
Desirable Yes Yes
Auto Yes No

For “on” mode, the link aggregation is forced to be formed without any PAgP negotiation. A port-channel is formed only if the peer port is also in “on” mode.

Question 10

Explanation

Interfaces Fa0/13 to Fa0/15 are bundled into Port-channel 12 and it is running with “desirable” mode -> it is using PAgP.

Comments
  1. No comments yet.
  1. No trackbacks yet.