Aggregated Links; How 802.3Ad Link Aggregation Operates - 3Com 3824 Implementation Manual

Aggregated Links

How 802.3ad Link
Aggregation
Operates
Aggregated links are connections that allow devices to communicate
using up to eight member links in parallel. Aggregated links provide the
following benefits:
They can potentially increase the bandwidth of a connection. The
capacity of the multiple links is combined into one logical link.
They can provide redundancy — if one link is broken, the other links
share the traffic for that link.
Figure 1 shows two Switches connected using an aggregated link
containing four member links. If all ports on both Switch units are
configured as 1000BASE-TX and they are operating in full duplex, the
potential maximum bandwidth of the connection is 8 Gbps.
Figure 1 Switch units connected using an aggregated link
.
Your Switch supports IEEE Std 802.3-2002 (incorporating 802.3ad)
aggregated links which use the Link Aggregation Control Protocol
(LACP). LACP provides automatic, point-to-point redundancy between
two devices (switch-to-switch or switch-to-server) that have full duplex
connections operating at the same speed.
By default, LACP is disabled on all Switch ports.
If a member link in an aggregated link fails, the traffic using that link is
dynamically reassigned to the remaining member links in the aggregated
link. Figure 2 shows the simplest case: two member links, that is the
physical links, form an aggregated link. In this example, if link 1 fails, the
data flow between X and B is remapped to physical link 2. The
re-mapping occurs as soon as the Switch detects that a member link has
Aggregated Links 19