POEGEM12T2SFP User Manual

3-15. Trunking Configuration

Port Trunking is used to Aggregate Ports into a logical trunk usually called Link Aggregation. Link Aggregation can bundle more than one port with the same speed, full duplex and the same MAC address to be a single logical port, thus the logical port aggregates the bandwidth of these ports. This allows the switch to aggregate multiple ports together to form a high bandwidth backbone link.

The POEGEM12T2SFP supports two kinds of trunking methods:

LACP:

Ports that are using Link Aggregation Control Protocol (according to the IEEE 802.3ad standard) as their trunking method can choose their unique LACP Group ID (1-8) to form a logical “Trunked Port”. The benefit of using LACP is that a port makes an agreement with its peer port before it becomes a ready member of a “Trunk Group” (also called Aggregator).

The POEGEM12T2SFP LACP function does not support the following:

-Link Aggregation across switches

-Aggregation with non IEEE 802.3 MAC links

-If the ports are operating in Half Duplex mode

-Aggregate the ports with different data rates

Static Trunk:

Ports that are using Static trunk as their Trunk method can choose their unique Static Group ID (also 1 – 8, this static group ID can be the same as a LACP group ID) to form a logical “Trunked Port”. A benefit of using Static Trunking is that a port can become a member of a trunk group without any handshaking with its peer port. This can also be a disadvantage because the peer ports of the Trunk group may not know that the ports should be aggregated together to form a trunk group. Using Static trunking at both ends of the link is highly recommended.

The POEGEM12T2SFP allow up to 8 LACP trunk groups and another additional 8 trunk groups for static trunking. Only 8 groups can be used at one time. Each trunk group can contain a maximum of 12 member ports.

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Alloy Computer Products POEGEM12T2SFP user manual Trunking Configuration, Static Trunk