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Load Sharing on the Switch
Load Sharing on the Switch
Configuring Load
Sharing
3-6
Load sharing with switches allows you to increase bandwidth and
resilience between switches by using a group of ports to carry traffic
in parallel between switches. The sharing algorithm allows the
switch to use multiple ports as a single logical port. For example,
VLANs see the load-sharing group as a single logical port. The
algorithm also guarantees packet sequencing between clients.
If a port in a load-sharing group fails, traffic is redistributed to the
remaining ports in the load-sharing group. If the failed port becomes
active again, traffic is redistributed to include that port.
Load sharing must be enabled on both ends of the link, or a network
loop will result.
Load sharing is most useful in cases where the traffic transmitted
from the switch to the load-sharing group is sourced from an equal
or greater number of ports on the switch. For example, traffic
transmitted to a two-port load-sharing group should originate from
a minimum of two other ports on the same switch.
This feature is supported between Allied Telesyn Gigabit Ethernet
switches only, but may be compatible with third-party "trunking" or
sharing algorithms. Check with an Allied Telesyn's Technical Support
department for more information.
To set up the switch to load share among ports, you must create a
load-sharing group of ports. Load-sharing groups are defined
according to the following rules:
Ports on the switch are divided into groups of two or four.
Ports in a load-sharing group must be contiguous.
Follow the outlined boxes in Table 3-4 through Table 3-5 to
determine the valid port combinations.
The first port in the load-sharing group is configured to be the
"master" logical port. This is the reference port used in
configuration commands. It can be thought of as the logical
port representing the entire port group.
Note
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