How Hunt Groups Load Share - Avaya P580 User Manual

Chapter 6

How Hunt Groups Load Share

Forwarding
Engines and
Fabric Ports
80-Series
Forwarding
Engines
Fabric Ports
6-14
Forwarding Engine (FE) - A generic name for hardware that makes layer
2 and layer 3 forwarding decisions.
Participating (or Non-Participating) Forwarding Engine - A forwarding
engine that has a port is part of the Hunt Group. Example, a M8024 (80-
series module with 24 10/100 Mbps ports), the first 12 ports are serviced by
a single Forwarding Engine. If any of those 12 ports participates in a hunt
group, then that Forwarding Engine is considered a participating forwarding
engine.
Each 80-series Media module has at least two Forwarding Engines, and as
many as eight. These engines are the major hardware components for
bridging and routing data traffic. The Forwarding Engines can service up to
twelve 10/100 Mbps ports. Example, 24-port 10/100 Mbps 80-series media
module has two Forwarding Engines that service twelve 10/100 Mbps ports
each. An eight-port Gigabit module has eight forwarding engines one for
each of the Gigabit ports per slot. See
media modules (50-series and 80-series) to Forwarding Engines.
The Forwarding Engines are numbered starting at one and increased by one
for each Forwarding Engine. The Supervisor module always has
Forwarding Engines numbered one and two. For a 7-slot P580 switch,
numbers one and two for the Supervisor module and up to eight per media
module slot for a maximum total of 50 Forwarding Engines. For a 17-slot
P882, numbers one and two for the Supervisor module and up to eight for
each of the media modules, for a maximum total of 130. The numbering
sequence will vary depending on the type and total number of media
modules. If the switch has empty slots the numbering sequence is bypassed
for the empty slots.
The P580/P882 has two backplane connections or ports for each media
module. These ports connect the media modules to the backplane Cross Bar
Switch Fabric, which in turn connects all modules to all other modules and
ports. These ports are referred to as "Switch Fabric Ports". There are two
Switch Fabric ports per media module slot (slots 2 through 7, or slots 2-17)
and one fabric port for the Supervisor slot (slot 1)
series media module can use up to two fabric ports in the slot, the number of
Forwarding Engines to fabric ports varies with the media module. There is
anywhere from one to four Forwarding Engines per fabric port for each 80-
series media module (Table
The number of Forwarding Engines are distributed among the ports for 80-
series modules. The 80-series 10/100 Mbps media modules are distributed
with 12 10/100 ports for each Forwarding engine. For example, the 48 port
10/100 media module has four Forwarding Engines. The first 12 (1-12)
User Guide for the Avaya P580 and P882 Multiservice Switches, v6.0
Table 6-3 for the relationship of
(Figure
6-3).
6-7).Each 80-