Port Channel Fabric Interface Connection; Port Numbering Convention - Cisco Nexus 5000 Series Configuration Manual

Configuring the Fabric Extender
The redistribution of the host interfaces will always be in an ascending order by the port number of the
Note
fabric interface.

Port Channel Fabric Interface Connection

To provide load balancing between the host interfaces and the parent switch, you can configure the Fabric
Extender to use a port channel fabric interface connection. This connection bundles 10-Gigabit Ethernet fabric
interfaces into a single logical channel as shown in the following figure.
Figure 32: Port Channel Fabric Interface Connection
When you configure the Fabric Extender to use a port channel fabric interface connection to its parent switch,
the switch load balances the traffic from the hosts that are connected to the host interface ports by using the
following load-balancing criteria to select the link:
• For a Layer 2 frame, the switch uses the source and destination MAC addresses.
• For a Layer 3 frame, the switch uses the source and destination MAC addresses and the source and
A fabric interface that fails in the port channel does not trigger a change to the host interfaces. Traffic is
Note
automatically redistributed across the remaining links in the port channel fabric interface. If all links in
the fabric port channel go down, all host interfaces on the FEX are set to the down state.

Port Numbering Convention

The following port numbering convention is used for the Fabric Extender:
destination IP addresses.
Cisco Nexus 5000 Series NX-OS Layer 2 Switching Configuration Guide, Release 5.0(3)N1(1)
Port Channel Fabric Interface Connection
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