xStack® DES-3528/DES-3552 Series Layer 2 Managed Stackable Fast Ethernet Switch Web UI Reference Guide
101
Link Aggregation
Understanding Port Trunk Groups
Port trunk groups are used to combine a number of ports together to make a single high-bandwidth data pipeline.
The Switch supports up to eight port trunk groups with two to eight ports in each group. A potential bit rate of 8000
Mbps can be achieved.
4-33 Example of Port Trunk Group
The Switch treats all ports in a trunk group as a single port. Data transmitted to a specific host (destination address)
will always be transmitted over the same port in a trunk group. This allows packets in a data stream to arrive in the
same order they were sent.
Link aggregation allows several ports to be grouped together and to act as a single link. This gives a bandwidth
that is a multiple of a single link's bandwidth.
Link aggregation is most commonly used to link a bandwidth intensive network device or devices, such as a server,
to the backbone of a network.
The Switch allows the creation of up to eight link aggregation groups, each group consisting of 2 to 8 links (ports).
The (optional) Gigabit ports can only belong to a single link aggregation group.
All of the ports in the group must be members of the same VLAN, and their STP status, static multicast, traffic
control; traffic segmentation and 802.1p default priority configurations must be identical. Port locking and 802.1X
must not be enabled on the trunk group. Further, the LACP aggregated links should be configured as full duplex.
The Master Port of the group is to be configured by the user, and all configuration options, including the VLAN
configuration that can be applied to the Master Port, are applied to the entire link aggregation group.