I'm trying to get some more thruput to a remote site that's connected via fiber optic lines, media converters and Catalyst switches.
The central site has a C3750 switch, which right now I'm also using to handle some static routing, so the port which is connected to an offsite C2950 switch is set to "no switchport" and has an IP address nailed to it. Routing is working well. There are two identical 100Mbps fiber optic lines and sets of media converters going to the C2950 at the remote site, so what I'd like to know is if it is possible to bond two ports in each switch together in an etherchannel, yet still keep a nailed IP address on the etherchannel at the C3750 switch since it would be acting as like a router's interface port?
I had once tried creating a separate vlan on the C3750, assigning the IP address to that vlan, and making the fast ethernet port which is connected to the fiber link into a member of that vlan. Routing worked ok, but thruput to the remote site dropped dramatically. It seems that routing the vlan was much slower than routing an individual hardware
10/100 port on the C3750.What I need is a two-port etherchannel going from the C3750 across dual fibers to the C2950 (a layer-2 only switch) and still be able to do static routing back at the C3750 end without losing any routing performance, since the remote site with the C2950 is all numbered on a different tcp/ip network address as the home office. Is this going to be possible?
Also, I've got a second remote site with another C2950 (let's call it remote site "B" and two fiber runs going from the original remote site "A". Remote site "B" has the same network ip address as site "A" does, and is effectively just another "wiring closet" bridged off from site "A" even though it is a couple miles away. Can I have a dual-interface etherchannel with routing from the home office's C3750 going to Remote A's C2950 with routing at the home office C3750 plus a dual-interface etherchannel going from Remote A's C2950 to Remote B's C2950 where I have a bandwidth-hungry client located? I don't have the money to replace all the fiber hardware with gigabit media converters and the C2950's with 3750 gigabit switches, or I'd do that. If I could get the
200Mbps equivalency load balancing of a dual-interface ethernchannel routed from home office thru remote site A and over to remote site B, it sure would help a lot until next year when I might be able to budget for upgrading the WAN infrastructure to gigabit hardware.