Gigabit Etherchannel

[tselvan]

Hi All,

Can I bundle Fiber and copper ports into the same etherchannel in Catalyst 6500 series switches?

I basically want to create redundancy,ie when fiber goes down,traffic still goes thru copper

All ideas are appreciated.

Thanks

[86sk8brder]

"EtherChannel bundles can consist of up to eight physical ports of the same Ethernet media type and speed." - CCNP BCMSN Exam Certification Guide 3rd Ed. p.184 by David Hucaby

Perhaps you could create two seperate EtherChannels: one fiber, one copper. You could then enable load balancing across both EtherChannels or tweak your Spanning Tree settings to allow you to specify which one is forwarding.

[tselvan]

Chris,Thanks for the piece of technical advice

[jackyoung]

When tou configure the Etherchannel, the traffic will be load-sharing through those channelled links and not active-standby stage. If you require active-standby, you may need to enable L3 routing for it.

Below are the GEC config. sample.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk389/tk213/tech_configuration_examples_list.html

Normally, I don't find any problem to enable GEC at copper and fibre. According to below link, Etherchannel does not depend on media.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk1330/technologies_design_guide_chapter09186a0080666712.html

According to Chris's response, it may not able to enable with mixed-media in same channel group. However, I cannot test it at the moment, you can try to test it and let us know the result.

Another good article for your reference.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk389/tk213/technologies_tech_note09186a0080094714.shtml

[tselvan]

Thanks Jack for your quick and prompt response.

One of my colleague has tested this in a lab setup,but not on a production network.Anyway I will let you know the result.

[globalnettech]

Hello,

in addition to the other posts, just be aware that with Etherchannel, the participating member links are actually not used equally. The default load balancing mode is src-mac (source MAC). To give you an example, if you have many users accessing the same server, with the default load balancing mode being source MAC, all traffic would go through one of the member links. In an situation like this, you might want to change the default to e.g. destination MAC, using the command:

port-channel load-balance dst-mac

You can see the actual utilization of the member links with the command 'show etherchannel load-balance'...

Regards,

GNT