[c-nsp] Catalyst port groups with trunk ports in between

[Michael K. Smith]

Hello Eric:

>From a design perspective, the bonding of two ethernet ports is done from
your equipment to the customer equipment on both sides, something like this.


     Port A ---- Port A                         Port A --- Port A
Cust Switch      Your Switch - Gig Trunk - Your Switch     Cust Switch
     Port B ---- Port B                         Port B --- Port B

In the above, you would set the Port A/Port A and Port B/Port B up as your
channel groups using the appropriate configuration (trunk or no trunk) for
the configuration.  As long as the configuration of the ports matches on
both sides you should be good to go.

I'm assuming you want to run multiple GigE links across a single set of
fibers.  If you can get more fiber then you can just build another Port
Channel group across the two GigE connections using standard GBICS. If you
need to run across one set of fibers you will have to go with another
solution such as CWDM, DWDM, 1310/1550 single-fiber transceivers, etc.

Hope that helps!

Mike


On 3/28/06 4:57 PM, "Eric Kagan" <ekagan at axsne.com> wrote:

> We have the following setup, sample config below.
>  
> We have 2 Data Centers connected via Dark Fiber terminated on Catalyst
> switches with GBIC's - Gig port is a trunk.
>  
> We have a customer with equipment in both locations so we hand him a 100mb
> ethernet on his own VLAN.  It been working fine for a year.
>  
> The customer is pushing the 100mb port and wants 200mb (or GB).  Since these
> are Catalyst 3500XL L2 devices I cannot rate limit or police traffic, so I
> don't want to give them the 2nd GB port on the switch for fear they will
> suck up all the bandwidth (they are doing data replication of terabytes of
> data so I could see this happening).  We do not want to upgrade the switches
> right now so my idea was add another 100mb port and bond them together.
>  
> So.......we tried a bunch of different configurations and all hell broke
> loose.  They configured port groups on both their switches at each site.  I
> tried adding the 2nd FE to the same VLAN 5, no good.  Diff VLAN 6, no good.
> I created port groups on both of our switches to see if we could do a
> local-local bonding, no good. (We would get either no connectivity across,
> VLAN mismatches, Relearn Addr errors, etc).  Are we breaking this by being
> in the middle with VLAN's vs. regular ethernet cables ?  Can this work ?
> Has anyone ever done this ?
>  
> If we want to hand then 200mb, what do we need to do on the 2 fiber trunk
> switches ?  If I can prove out our side, then they need to prove out theirs.
> (The unknown is whether the customer equipment would even work back to back
> directly regardless of us in the middle)
>  
>  
> Do all 4 switches need a port group (Side A cust - Side A us - fiber trunk -
> Side B us - Side B Cust) where we talk to them at each site with a port
> group ?  Do they still need their own VLAN ?
>  
> or should we be able to just add the 2nd FE to same VLAN 5 ? or hand 2nd FE
> on seperate VLAN (i.e. 6) so it looks like 2 diff Ethernet feeds ?
> 
> Thanks
> Eric
>  
>  
> (Current Config - both sides the same)
>  
> interface FastEthernet0/5
>  description connected to Cust A
>  switchport access vlan 5
> 
> interface GigabitEthernet0/1
>  description connected to fiber-trunk
>  switchport trunk allowed vlan 1,2,4,5,6,7,8,12,1002-1005
>  switchport mode trunk
> 
>  
>  
> (Additional port ??)    --- ??? same vlan ? diff vlan ?  port group
> Cust-Colo Loc A  ???
> interface FastEthernet0/6
>  description connected to Cust A
>  switchport access vlan 5
>  port group 5
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