Link Aggregation; Lacp; Port Mirroring - Avaya 2330 Manual

Link aggregation

Link Aggregation allows one or more links to be aggregated together to form a Link Aggregation
Group (LAG), such that a MAC Client can treat the Link Aggregation Group as if it were a single
link. This allows for faster connections between devices managed as a single connection, load
sharing and load balancing among the individual links within a logical connection, and a failure
mechanism that allows a link to stay up at a reduced peak rate even if some of the physical
ports go out of service.
The Secure Router 2330/4134 supports IEEE 802.3ad-based link aggregation, which, through
the Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP), supports a dynamic link aggregation function
that can add links dynamically, as they become available, to a trunk group.

LACP

IEEE 802.3ad-based (IEEE 802.3 2002 clause 43) link aggregation allows you to aggregate
one or more links together to form a link aggregation group (LAG), such that a MAC client can
treat the LAG as if it were a single link.
LACP dynamically detects whether links can be aggregated into a link aggregation group and
does so when links become available. The main purpose of LACP is to manage device ports
and their port memberships to form link aggregation groups (LAG). LACP can dynamically add
or remove LAG ports, depending on their availability and states.
Aside from automatic link aggregation, a side benefit of LACP is its ability to detect link layer
failure within a service provider network. LACP packets are exchanged end-to-end. Therefore,
if a link in the middle fails and the local ports do not register the failure, LACP times out and
disables the port for traffic.
Load balancing is achieved based on the following prerequisites:
• The MAC addresses of the received packets must be Known Unicast.
• The algorithm is based on 5-tuples, therefore a uniformly changing src mac, dest mac,
src IP, dest IP, and protocol leads to more balanced traffic distribution.

Port mirroring

The Secure Router 2330/4134 has a port mirroring feature that helps you to monitor and
analyze network traffic. The monitoring (destination) port can be connected to a network
analyzer or RMON probe for packet analysis. Unlike other methods that are used to analyze
packet traffic, the packet traffic is uninterrupted and packets flow normally through the mirrored
port.
Configuration — Layer 2 Ethernet
Link aggregation
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