DGS-3700-12/DGS-3700-12G Series Layer 2 Gigabit Ethernet Switch User Manual
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Port Trunking

Understanding Port Trunk Groups

Port trunk groups are used to combine a number of ports together t o make a single high-bandwidth data pipeline.
DGS-3700 Series supports up to 6 port trunk groups with 2 to 8 port s in each group. A potent ial b it rat e of 8000 Mb ps
can be achieved.
Figure 3 - 23 Example of Port Trunk Group
The Switch treats all ports in a trunk group as a single port. Data transmitted to a specific host (destination addr ess)
will always be transmitted over the same port in a trunk group. This allows packets in a data stream to arrive in the
same order they were sent.
NOTE: If any ports within the trunk group become disconnected, packets intended for the
disconnected ports will be load shared among the other unlinked ports of the li nk aggregation
group.
Link aggregation allows several ports to be grouped together and to ac t as a si n gle l ink . T his gives a ba nd widt h th at is
a multiple of a single link's bandwidth.
Link aggregation is most commonly used to link a bandwidth intensive network device or d evices, s uch as a server, to
the backbone of a network.
The Switch allows the creation of up to 6 link aggregation groups, each group consisting of 2 to 8 links (por ts). The
aggregated links must be contiguous (they must have sequential port num bers) except the four (optional) Gigabit
ports, which can only belong to a single link aggregation group . All of t he ports in the group m ust be m embers of the