Port Channel Fabric Interface Connection - Cisco Nexus B22 Design And Deployment Manual

The relationship of host-side ports to parent switch fabric ports is static. If a fabric interface fails, all its associated
host interfaces are brought down and will remain down until the fabric interface is restored. Figure 3 shows static
port mappings.
Figure 3:
Static Port Mapping Based on Max Link Parameter

Port Channel Fabric Interface Connection

The Port Channel fabric interface provides an alternative way of connecting the parent switch and the Cisco
Nexus B22 for IBM fabric extender. In this mode of operation, the physical fabric links are bundled into a single
logical channel. This approach prevents a single fabric interconnect link loss from disrupting traffic to any one
server. The total bandwidth of the logical channel is shared by all the servers, and traffic is spread across the
members through the use of a hash algorithm.

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
destination IP addresses.
Since both redundancy and increased bandwidth are possible, configuration of the fabric links on a Port Channel
is the most popular connection option.
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