Etherchannel in a stack

[mcardell]

Good Morning,

I am trying to implement in a small data center redundancy and good performances.

I have already 2 2950 EI with 48 ports. For redundancy I will connect the servers to both the swithces and the switches between them with Gigaethernet.

I'd like to know if it is possible to use both the FE to the sever (from different switches) and implement in this stacks of switches etherchannel between port of different devices to have a load balancing between the two links.

Is it possible to have this configuration with another 3500XL?

Any helpful link to cisco website for sample configuration?

Are the switches able to tolerate a crash of one of them in this configuration?

Any help is appreciate

Thanks

Matteo

[efrahim]

Channel is only supported if the ports are on the same switch in any cisco switches. Channeling is basically only for port bandwidth aggregation and in turns gives redundancy .. The solution you are looking for,, there is something like adaptive load balancing supported by some NICs card, in which case, load balancing is done in the software of the NIC , between the connected links and in that case, you can connect the ports on different switches but it has nothing to do with the channeling on the switches- for switches, these are two ports which are active..

Here is the link on the compaq website that explains in detail.. Many vendors Dell , Intel etc, support these too..

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/servers/networking/teaming.html