On 27/01/2011 07:57, Mohammad Khalil wrote:
its on Cisco 7606-S , the connection is port channel with 5 physical interfaces

Oh, you Really Don't Want To Do That(tm). For etherchannels on EARL7 architecture, if you want your load balancing to be roughly equal, you need to ensure that your port channels are configured with either 2, 4 or 8 physical interfaces. The reason for this is due to limitations on the EARL7 chip on the sup720 - specifically, there are only 3 bits of bucket space, which means 1) no more than 8 active links and 2) severe limitations in the load balancing algorithm.

If you have 5 physical interfaces, the load balancing will work out (in the optimal case) as 2:2:2:1:1. This means that you effectively have (2+2+2+1+1)/(2+2+2+2+2) = 4/5 of the total etherchannel capacity available for traffic. I.e. you're actually not gaining anything by using more than 4 physical links.

There's a description here:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk389/tk213/technologies_tech_note09186a0080094714.shtml#cat6k

As this is a hardware limitation, the same load balancing profiles will be seen on IOS. So you can see from the table that even if you configure extra ports in a port channel interface, the overall bandwidth will not actually increase except in the case of 3 bearer links, where the aggregated bandwidth will be 2.66 * the speed of an individual physical link.

Incidentally, I stand corrected on Mikael Abrahamsson's previous post about overruns. I was quite wrong on that point.

Nick
_______________________________________________
cisco-nsp mailing list  cisco-nsp@puck.nether.net
https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-nsp
archive at http://puck.nether.net/pipermail/cisco-nsp/

Reply via email to