Trunk or no trunk..? Your advice needed..

[rgrcommo]

Got a Intel box hanging off a switch. The Intel box has 1 card with TWO fa0 eth ports on it. Its rated at 200-800mbps. I have the each port connected to the switch with no fancy config - just pluged in to the switch.

I was wondering if I Trunk the two lines going into the Intel box would this be better performance? Would I notice a difference? Any comments would be great..

thanks-

[pinku.doshi]

Hi,

Couple of things to clarify before answering from my point of view, if you mean to say that Intel box is basically not a switch & some sort of PC or server then it doen't justify the use of trunk.

Well in the switch terminology some sort of Fastetherchannel can be enabled for aggregating the throughput but not sure of this Intel box of how to configure a Fastetherchannel on it....I doubt it.

Also that since the Card is being rated in the range of 200-800mbs,I think at a max only 400 mbps will be supported in full duplex mode in total including both the ports.

I hope this should be ok....well As per my view....the best design should be to terminate one port of Intel on one switch & using the other port to terminate it on another switch.....Keeping redundancy in mind.

Regard's

Pinku P Doshi.

[rgrcommo]

The Intel box has a bunch of services on it.. It has a Fast Eth. ch. card installed.

i want to make this as fast as possibal with redundancy/ I agree with putting one port in one switch and one in the other..

thanks

[DALE FRANCIS]

Bear in Mind that PaGP (Protocl used for channeling in Cisco) and the later 802.3ad which is similar adn accomplishes the same are point to point protocols, so you will not be able to for a channel from the servers across multiple switches unless you had two Etherchannel capable cards.

Intel as far as i know supports Cisco's PaGP, so you could get link redundancy within a channel. I.E if a link in a bundle fails the traffic will traverse the 1 remaining operational link.

Also the figures quoted are basically 2 x 100 X F/D = 400 Mbps when bundled into a channel. The channel is seen as 1 physical or logical depending on one's views with multiple physical links.

If you plan to palce your server in one VLAN only then forget trunking as this will just add overhead whether you runn dot1q or ISL.

Summary:

For fat pipe.. use Channeling for redundancy and splitting links to different switches channeling is not and option unless you can get another NIC.

Unless you want your servers to be any many or all VLAN's then do not trunk as this will just add more overhead on traffic and CPU on the PC.

Regards

Dale

[rgrcommo]

thanks for the input..!