HP ProCurve Routing Switch 9308M / 9304M Reviewer’s Guide

2.6 Port Trunking (Link Aggregation)

Link Aggregation is the industry term for the ability to combine multiple coterminous links (links that begin at the same point and end at the same point) as one logical link.

Link aggregation allows two HP ProCurve routing switches to be interconnected by 2-to-4 of the same type of links, with all links acting as one higher-speed link. Since the number of links in a trunk is configurable, the bandwidth is scaleable to the needs of a particular network. For example,

(4)100Mbps links can be trunked to provide the equivalent of a 400 Mbps (800 Mbps full-duplex) link between two switches or 4 Gigabit links can be trunked for the equivalent of a 4 Gigabit (8 Gigabit full- duplex) link. Fiber-optic links can be trunked to interconnect switches across large campuses. Port trunking also provides redundancy on links between the two switches or switch and server. If one of the links fails, the traffic is moved to another link in the trunk in under one second.

The 9304M / 9308M have two forms of trunking, switch and server. Switch trunking balances traffic across the links based on destination address, server trunking uses the source addresses for load balancing. The MAC address is used if the trunked ports on the routing switch are switched, IP or IPX addresses are used for routed ports. Use the switch form of trunking to interconnect switches and the server version of trunking to interconnect the routing switch with a server.

The HP ProCurve Routing Switch 9304M and HP ProCurve Routing Switch 9308M have been certified for use with HP-UX server trunked ports.

Up to 4 links can be used in a trunk. All links in a particular trunk must be on the same module, contiguous, start with a port on a MOD4 boundary (1,5,9,13, 17, or 21) and have the same characteristics, i.e. duplex, QoS, etc. Based on these requirements, the 9304M can have a maximum of 22 trunk groups, the 9308M can have 46 trunk groups.

Trunks on the routing switches are compatible with the HP Trunks on other HP ProCurve switches; use the DA (destination address) setting. These trunks are also compatible with Cisco Fast EtherChannel trunks; use the server form of the trunk on the 9304M / 9308M and turn PAgP off on the FEC side.

2.7 Filtering

Both the HP ProCurve Routing Switch 9304M and HP ProCurve Routing Switch 9308M support a variety of Layer 2 and Layer 3 filters. With the exception of AppleTalk and broadcast packets, filtering is done in hardware so there is no performance penalty for using filters. With filter hierarchy defined by the user, filtering is very flexible.

All filters can be specified for individual ports, groups of ports, or globally. This flexibility allows definition of very specific rules for how a packet should be handled.

Filter maximums: 1024 per chassis, 128 on any one port.

2.7.1 Layer 2 Filtering

Filters at Layer 2 are:

�Inbound and/or outbound MAC addresses

�Frame types

The frame type field can be used to filter on Layer 3 protocol types without having the router functionality of the routing switch involved.

©1999 Hewlett-Packard Company

Revision 4.0 – 4/1/1999

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