In This Chapter; Trunking Overview - Brocade Communications Systems 1606 Administrator's Manual

Managing Trunking Connections

In this chapter

Trunking overview

The trunking feature optimizes the use of bandwidth by allowing a group of inter-switch links (ISLs)
to merge into a single logical link. Trunking is automatically implemented for any eligible ISLs after
you install the Brocade ISL Trunking license. The license must be installed on each switch that
participates in trunking. For details on obtaining and installing licensed features, see
"Administering
Brocade's trunking feature supports the following trunking configurations:
•
•
•
•
In a fabric with numerous switches, you can increase the bandwidth between switches by enabling
multiple physical ports to appear as a single port. Enabling multiple physical ports form a trunking
group where the traffic is distributed dynamically and in order at the frame level, thus achieving
greater performance with fewer inter-switch links. Trunking groups are based on the user port
number with contiguous eight ports as one group, such as 0-7, 8-15, and 16-23.
Trunking is performed based on the Quality of Service (QoS) configuration on the master and the
slave ports. That is, in a given trunk group, if there are some ports with QoS enabled and some with
QoS disabled, they form two different trunks, one with QoS enabled and the other with QoS
disabled. For more information on QoS, refer to
Fabric OS Administrator's Guide
53-1001763-01
•
Trunking overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 425
•
Supported hardware . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 427
•
Recommendations for trunking groups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 427
•
Basic trunk group configuration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 428
•
Trunking over long distance fabrics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 430
•
F_Port trunking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 431
•
F_Port masterless trunking. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 433
Licensing".
ISL trunking configurations are only applicable to E_Ports.
F_Port trunking configurations are only applicable to two separate Fabric OS switches where
all the ports on each switch reside in the same quad and are running at the same speed.
EX_Port frame trunking configurations are between an FC router and the edge fabric. See
"EX_Port frame trunking configuration"
trunking.
F_Port Masterless trunking configurations are on edge switches running in Access Gateway
mode where the trunk ports are F_Ports, which are connected as N_Ports.
on page 474 for additional information about EX_Port
"QoS zones" on page 406.
Chapter
19
Chapter 16,
425