[nsp] Etherchannel

[Gert Doering]

Hi,

On Tue, Feb 18, 2003 at 03:03:51PM -0500, Jason Greenberg wrote:
> We used Etherchannel in an backbone environment between a 7513 and a
> 2900xl, and we only found that it was buggy, unreliable, and was a poor
> load-balancer.

The way it load-balances is *not* "per-packet" (due to ethernet packet 
ordering constraints).  It's mostly by source/destination MAC address,
so if you have a router on one end, load-balancing is likely to be poor.

> Has anyone on the list used Etherchannel in an ISP backbone before?  I
> find that I much prefer layer 3 balancing for stability and
> manageability.

We use it between a couple of Catalysts 5500/5000s and one 2900XL that do 
not have GigE yet.  Some links are 2x 100, some are 4x 100, and all of
them work as expected, due to the wide variation of traffic peers on
that networks.

gert
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Gert Doering - Munich, Germany                             gert at greenie.muc.de
fax: +49-89-35655025                        gert.doering at physik.tu-muenchen.de