Moxa EDS-405A-EIP-T [31/109] Using port trunking

Moxa Managed Ethernet Switches Featured Functions

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Using Port Trunking

Link aggregation involves grouping links into a link aggregation group. A MAC client can treat link aggregation

groups as if they were a single link.

The Moxa switch’s port trunking feature allows devices to communicate by aggregating up to 4 trunk groups,

with a maximum of 8 ports for each group. If one of the 8 ports fails, the other seven ports will automatically

provide backup and share the traffic.

Port trunking can be used to combine up to 8 ports between two Moxa switches. If all ports on both switches

are configured as 100BaseTX and they are operating in full duplex, the potential bandwidth of the connection

will be 1600 Mbps.

The Port Trunking Concept

Moxa has developed a port trunking protocol that provides the following benefits:

• Greater flexibility in setting up your network connections, since the bandwidth of a link can be doubled,

tripled, or quadrupled.

• Redundancy—if one link is broken, the remaining trunked ports share the traffic within this trunk group.

• Load sharing—MAC client traffic can be distributed across multiple links.

To avoid broadcast storms or loops in your network while configuring a trunk, first disable or disconnect all

ports that you want to add to the trunk or remove from the trunk. After you finish configuring the trunk, enable

or re-connect the ports.

If all ports on both switch units are configured as 100BaseTX and they are operating in full duplex mode, the

potential bandwidth of the connection will be up to 1.6 Gbps. This means that users can double, triple, or

quadruple the bandwidth of the connection by port trunking between two Moxa switches.

Each Moxa switch can set a maximum of 4 port trunking groups. When you activate port trunking, certain

settings on each port will be reset to factory default values or disabled:

• Communication redundancy will be reset

• 802.1Q VLAN will be reset

• Multicast Filtering will be reset

• Port Lock will be reset and disabled.

• Set Device IP will be reset

• Mirror will be reset

After port trunking has been activated, you can configure these items again for each trunking port.

Port Trunking Settings

The Port Trunking Settings page is where ports are assigned to a trunk group.