Etherchannel between Switches

[gilson_machado]

Is that possible to have an etherchannel connection between two different swicthes linked by a dot1q trunk?

[Bobby Thekkekandam · Accepted solution]

I'm assuming you mean that you want to configure an etherchannel to be a trunk as well. This is certainly supported. See the following doc:

http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/793/lan_switching/6.html#trunking

[gilson_machado]

No. I have two Sw6509 linked via Trunk+Ethechannel.

I wan to connect a server with dual NIC to them. One port in each SW6509. Than I want to make an etherchannel with those two ports.

Is that possible?

[emta · Accepted solution]

You can not configure Etherchannel spread across two switches. Etherchannel capability is within the same switch to increase the port bandwidth. For instance, if 100Meg full duplex (= 200Meg) is not enough to support traffic for the server connectivity, then you combined two ports (on the same switch but could be on seperate module or slot for some redundancy) to increase the port pipe to 200Meg full duplex or 400Meg.

However, if the purpose of the dual NICs on the server is strictly for redundancy, it is best to connect each NIC to a seperate switch so that if one switch is down, there is still connectivity to the server via the other switch.

Hope this explanation answers your question.