EtherChannel load-balance on Catalyst 6500 running CatOS

[richard.yang]

I know EtherChannel load balancing can use either MAC addresses, IP addresses, or the TCP port numbers.

1 Can I config it to make sure every port under the same Channel group has the same traffic utilization?

2 If one of the Etherchannel physical port has traffic more than its physical bandwidth, why switch can't use another Etherchannel physical port to share the traffic?

[glen.grant]

Normally it will fairly well balance the traffic . There is no way to make sure each channel is exactly the same utilization wise . You can look at how it is load balanced and make a change from say mac to ip address if it looks like you aren't getting the balance you want . It would be very rare that you are going to fill one port on the channel without filling the rest almost the same .Exceptions would be if you most of your traffic is headed to one place like a certain server , even then if you used ip addresses in both directions as the load balance I think it would balance out pretty good. If it got to that point where one link was almost filled you would have to think about adding another port to the channel . This is a real good page http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk389/tk213/technologies_tech_note09186a0080094714.shtml