Re: Is anyone doing link aggregation for normal ethernet traffic, if so how.

OK First Bridging and Link Aggregation are two completely different things. Yes they can be used together but let's keep them apart to start.

Link Aggregation: 'bundling' of multiple (2 to 8) Physical Ethernet lines to make them appear as one faster, and more resilient connection. A link aggregation bundle must terminate at one partition which can be IBM i 7.1 (with TR3) or VIOS. (Others too but for our purposes these two are most useful.) All the links MUST be the same speed (Gb or 10Gb) and MUST be Full Duplex links. They can terminate in the same or different Ethernet cards on the Power System but all links must be assigned to the same partition. The 'far end' terminates in a switch or set of switches but must be configured as an EtherChannel bundle there. Normally that will be one switch or switch 'stack' (Group of switches acting as one switch.) Once IBM officially supports LACP then multiple switches could be configured to participate.

Bridging connects an external network to an internal network. IBM i 7.1 (with TR3) and VIOS both support this. The connection to the physical network can be a single Ethernet line or an aggregated link. The bridge is NOT recommended to be using an HEA(IVE) card connection. ("...packets may not be delivered to the correct LPAR...") Now the internal VLANs are approximately 1Gb in speed. They are technically not using Ethernet as it's all memory to memory in reality but it's about 1G. So building up an aggregated link of 10G fibers to use for the bridge is unlikely to be of great benefit performance wise.

I do in fact have a two 1G aggregated link that's then bridged to internal networks and that's been running for some time and working very well.

In a second partition I then have a single GbE link bridged to the same VLAN for redundancy and it's set as the 2nd priority for the bridge.

You suggest that you could bridge the two 10G (in your case fiber) connections but that's not correct. To connect them together is Link Aggregation rather than bridging.

- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

On 12/13/2012 9:07 AM, Jack Kingsley wrote:

I am reading up on this and it seems there are several different ways to do
it. Appears you can do this with stand alone lpars and or with virtual and
using some sort of bridged approach. If you have a dual port 10GB fibre
connection, would you then need to ensure that 1 port went to one switch
and the other port to another switch, then bridge them.