NOTE: If any ports within the trunk group become disconnected, packets intended for the disconnected port will be load shared among the other uplinked ports of the link aggregation group.
Link aggregation allows several ports to be grouped together and to act as a single link. This gives a bandwidth that is a multiple of a single link's bandwidth.
Link aggregation is most commonly used to link a bandwidth intensive network device or devices, such as a server, to the backbone of a network.
The Switch allows the creation of up to 3 link aggregation groups, each group consisting of 2 to 4 links (ports). All of the ports in the group must be members of the same VLAN, and their STP status, static multicast, traffic control, traffic segmentation and 802.1p default priority configurations must be identical. Port locking, port mirroring and 802.1X must not be enabled on the trunk group. Further, the aggregated links must all be of the same speed and should be configured as
The Master Port of the group is to be configured by the user, and all configuration options, including the VLAN configuration that can be applied to the Master Port, are applied to the entire link aggregation group. Load balancing is automatically applied to the ports in the aggregated group, and a link failure within the group causes the network traffic to be directed to the remaining links in the group.
The Spanning Tree Protocol will treat a link aggregation group as a single link, on the switch level. On the port level, the STP will use the port parameters of the Master Port in the calculation of port cost and in determining the state of the link aggregation group. If two redundant link aggregation groups are configured on the Switch, STP will block one entire group, in the same way STP will block a single port that has a redundant link.
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