Etherchannel load-balancing

[gholbrow]

I have an etherchannel set up with 2 ports connecting 2 3550-12Ts. I am trying to steam large amounts of data from 6 ports of the upstream switch to a few clients connected to the downstream switch. How can I force data from a source port to use a specific port in the etherchannel? The only documentation that I can find says that traffic will use the same port for all traffic between 2 hosts.

What I really want to do is have the traffic on ports 1,2 and 3 use the first port in the etherchannel, and traffic from 4, 5 and 6 use the second port of the etherchannel.

I have complete flexibility in the network and can change any / all of the ip addresses for all machines involved. What I really need is to know what I should set them to so I can guarantee the traffic will follow a specific path.

Is the routing algorithm availible so I can calculate what IPs to use for all servers/clients involved to segment the traffic?

thanks for any help,

greg

[donewald]

Greg,

At it's most granular level you can only load-balance on an L2 port-channel using the following:

Awesome Catalyst Switch(config)#port-channel load-balance ?

dst-ip Dst IP Addr

dst-mac Dst Mac Addr

dst-port Dst TCP/UDP Port

src-dst-ip Src XOR Dst IP Addr

src-dst-mac Src XOR Dst Mac Addr

src-dst-port Src-Dst TCP/UDP Port

src-ip Src IP Addr

src-mac Src Mac Addr

src-port Src TCP/UDP Port

This will not get you "this port to that port" loading but might get you a better spread across the channel depending upon the type traffic that is being sent. What your talking about would require PBR (Policy based routing) which, as far as I know, is not there for any L2 policy decisions that would meet your needs.

Hope this helps you,

Don