Aggregated Links 19
Aggregated Links Aggregated links are connections that allow devices to communicate
using up to eight member links in parallel. Aggregated links provide the
following benefits:
■ They can potentially increase the bandwidth of a connection. The
capacity of the multiple links is combined into one logical link.
■ They can provide redundancy — if one link is broken, the other links
share the traffic for that link.
Figure 1
shows two Switches connected using an aggregated link
containing four member links. If all ports on both Switch units are
configured as 1000BASE-TX and they are operating in full duplex, the
potential maximum bandwidth of the connection is 8 Gbps.
Figure 1 Switch units connected using an aggregated link
.
How 802.3ad Link
Aggregation
Operates
Your Switch supports IEEE Std 802.3-2002 (incorporating 802.3ad)
aggregated links which use the Link Aggregation Control Protocol
(LACP). LACP provides automatic, point-to-point redundancy between
two devices (switch-to-switch or switch-to-server) that have full duplex
connections operating at the same speed.
By default, LACP is disabled on all Switch ports.
If a member link in an aggregated link fails, the traffic using that link is
dynamically reassigned to the remaining member links in the aggregated
link. Figure 2
shows the simplest case: two member links, that is the
physical links, form an aggregated link. In this example, if link 1 fails, the
data flow between X and B is remapped to physical link 2. The
re-mapping occurs as soon as the Switch detects that a member link has
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