D-Link DES-3528P [48/260] Link aggregation

DES-3550 Fast Ethernet Layer 2 Switch

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 DES-3550 supports up to six port trunk groups with 2 to 8 ports in each group. A potential bit rate of 8000 Mbps can be

achieved.

Figure 6- 7. 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.

NOTE: If any ports within the trunk group become disconnected, packets

intended for the disconnected port will be load shared among the other

uplinked ports of the link aggregation group.

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 six link aggregation groups, each group consisting of 2 to 8 links (ports). The

aggregated links must be contiguous (they must have sequential port numbers) except the two (optional) Gigabit ports, which

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, port mirroring and 802.1X must not be enabled on the trunk group. Further, the aggregated links must

all be of the same speed and 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.