On 6/11/2011 3:07 PM, James Bensley wrote: > OK, so now lets say you have a 24 x 100Mb port switch at the access > layer and you have an EtherChannel over ports 23 + 24 to give 200 Mbps > up to the distribution layer, how can you test that each end device is > capable of pushing the 200Mbs over the EtherChannel?
To begin with, you can't just throw 200Mbps at the problem, as a "port-channel" of 2(x) bandwidth doesn't mean you get 2(x) throughput, your maximum speed for any ONE connection is going to be 1(x) if you are talking about any of the Catalyst line of switches. You would have to push data that is particularly crafted for your switch load-balance algorithm. At layer-3, on a router, you can play with per-packet load balancing on multiple equal cost paths (an old T1 bonding game), but as the speeds increase you are likely to cause more layer-3 issues on the endpoints with out-of-order packets, not to mention the load on the routers. Or you can do flows over multiple equal cost paths with EIGRP and get some traffic-load-based load balancing per flow. But generically calling any aggregation of N*X links as providing N*X bandwidth is best left to the marketing department :) Jeff _______________________________________________ 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/
