From: R. Benjamin Kessler (bk-lists@kesslerconsulting.com)
Date: Thu Oct 31 2002 - 10:10:24 GMT-3
A lot of people chimed-in, did your original question get answered?
To re-state my post a different way:
EtherChannel works to "bond" multiple interfaces together to appear as a
single, logical "fat pipe." This only works when all of the server's
NICs are connected to the same switch. This does provide some
redundancy in that you can have different physical NICs in the server in
different PCI slots connecting over different cables to separate line
cards (at least in 6500's) but they're still on the same switch.
To achieve "increased high availability" with your server's network
connection, you can connect two NICs to two different switches (provided
that both NICs are in the same broadcast domain - i.e. VLAN) and
configure them for fail-over (one active, one standby).
To take it a step further, you can do all of the above (if you have
enough NICs and switch ports).
Compaq (for one) uses the term "teaming" to describe the process of
presenting a "virtual NIC" to the OS - on the Intel platform. Other
vendors have their own buzzword to describe this (NetRAIN is one that
comes to mind - also a DEC/Compaq/HP term used primarily on the VAX and
Alpha platform).
I've had good success with implementations that shared a virtual MAC
address (ala HSRP and Compaq teaming on NT/Win2K); I've had mixed
success with NetRAIN where the standby NIC assumes the MAC address of
the failed card (works great on 6500's with SUP2/MSFC2's; doesn't on
SUP1a/MSFC1's - there's an issue - bug - with the MLS cache not being
updated properly).
I hope this helps; if you have other questions post a follow-up.
Thanks,
Ben
-----Original Message-----
From: nobody@groupstudy.com [mailto:nobody@groupstudy.com] On Behalf Of
Nate Kleven
Sent: Wednesday, October 30, 2002 12:33 PM
To: ccielab@groupstudy.com
Subject: FastEther Channel
Can I build a FastEther channel to a server if it is homed to two
different
chassis? In other words, if I had a teaming NIC, can I plug one
connection
into SwitchA and the second into SwitchB for redundancy? Is there a
better
way to do that?
Thanks.
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