3-11. Trunking Configuration
The Port Trunking Configuration is used to configure the settings of Link Aggregation. You can bundle more than one port with the same speed, full duplex and the same MAC to be a single logical port, thus the logical port aggregates the bandwidth of these ports. This means you can apply your current Ethernet equipments to build the bandwidth aggregation. For example, if there are three Fast Ethernet ports aggregated in a logical port, then this logical port has bandwidth three times as high as a single Fast Ethernet port has.
The switch supports two kinds of port trunking methods:
LACP:
Ports using Link Aggregation Control Protocol (according to IEEE 802.3ad specification) as their trunking method can choose their unique LACP GroupID (1~3) to form a logic “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). LACP is safer than the other trunking method - static trunk.
The switch LACP does not support the followings:
Link Aggregation across switches
Aggregation with
Operating in
Aggregate the ports with different data rates
Static Trunk:
Ports using Static Trunk as their trunk method can choose their unique Static GroupID (also 1~3, this Static groupID can be the same with another LACP groupID) to form a logic “trunked port”. The benefit of using Static Trunk method is that a port can immediately become a member of a trunk group without any handshaking with its peer port. This is also a disadvantage because the peer ports of your static trunk group may not know that they should be aggregate together to form a “logic trunked port”. Using Static Trunk on both end of a link is strongly recommended. Please also note that low speed links will stay in “not ready” state when using static trunk to aggregate with high speed links.
As to system restrictions about the port aggregation function on the switch,
In the management point of view, the switch supports maximum 3 trunk groups for LACP and additional 3 trunk groups for Static Trunk. But in the system capability view, only 3 “real trunked” groups are supported. An LACP trunk group with more than one ready
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