Difference between Trunking and Ether Channel?

On 24.05.2006 08:22 unknown wrote

In Cisco speech

trunking == having multiple vlans on one port

channeling == having multiple physical ports form a logical one

Be careful when dealing with other vendors. What's Cisco-channeling is $vendor-trunking.

To answer your question: depends on. If one port gives enough bandwidth for connecting both switches then you don't need need neither trunking nor channeling. If you need multiple ports you will have to channel.

That was quick......Since its going to be a single VLAN,I guess channelling is the way to go.So if I am to channel 4 ports between two switches,realistically I should get abt 400Mbps. am I correct?

On 24.05.2006 09:50 unknown wrote

Yes, if you channel 4 FastEthernet ports you should be able to get

400Mbps. For GigabitEthernet I would expect more ;-) Please also note that you may not gain any mor ebandwidth if you channel 5 - 7 ports. This is likely to only increase the reliability of your channel due to the algorithm the switches are using to distribute the load across the single links. Afaik the algo is as follows

#ports load per port

---------------------------

2 4 4 3 3 3 2 4 2 2 2 2 5 2 2 2 1 1 6 2 2 1 1 1 1 7 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 8 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

Arnold, Wish I had a gigabit switch,would have made things better.Am afraid my switch is pretty old one, just 100Mbps.So which one would you adv 2 3 or 4?

Cheers

Unknown,

With an Etherchannel config you are placing serveral ports on the switch in a group. For your solution a trunk is the best option. Only one port is needed for your solution.

But I am afraid that this 1 port will become the bottle neck.My application are network intensive,they write to nfs regurarly.