etherchannel w/ports on different 4948s?

You may wish to investigate the Opus One Assessment of the Cisco 4948:

Brad Reese

Interesting document - thanks.

To the Original Poster, the answer is no.

No Cisco equipment supports this senario.

You may want to consider L3 load sharing.

Do you mean say 2 ports on 1 switch grouped together and the ends on 2 different switches?

One device with dual NIC connected to two different 4948s. In other words, cross-connected using PAgP as part of an HA design. I seem to recall having done this on different 4000s at some point. I'd be interested in looking at any solution allowing for cross-connection, L2 or L3.

Thanks

Well that is hardly an etherchannel.

I believe that Broadcom NICs support HA with LACP to two switches.

I have not seen Cisco documentation on this however I have had a think about it and it looks really nice to me.

As I understand it the switch does standard LACP (or I suppose PaGP) and any magic is handled at the other end. I think that the failover behaviour pretty much comes for free in the protocol and needs little or no specific support. One way to prove this otherwise might be to test the behaviour with three switches two links one port channel.

AFAIR LACP & Pagp both use ID codes down each link in a potential bundle to make sure the same "device" connects to each line. Otherwise you wont get 1 bundle.

- which is probably a good thing, since the load balancing is done separately at each end and untangling the resulting destinations without having a loop could get messy

- so links within 1 bundle are confined to a single switch unless you have some clever software etc.

Only "fix" i know for this is the Nortel 8021ad software feature which lets

Passport 8600 last time i looked at this.

messagenews: snipped-for-privacy@38g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...

LACP & Pagp both use ID codes down each link in a potential bundle to

Thats interesting, thanks.