Link Aggregation and EtherChannel discovery

IP 9.1 has been enhanced with functionality to manage link aggregation, which is recognized by industry as Etherchannel or Portchannel. This means that IP server recognizes multiple connections between two devices as a single consolidated connection.

Link Aggregation allows one or more ports to be aggregated together to form a Link Aggregation Group (LAG), such that a MAC Client can treat the Link Aggregation Group as if it were a single link.

Note:

Link Aggregation Group (LAG) discovery is supported on Cisco Nexus 5000 switches through CLI discovery. LAG can be formed using LACP / PAGP (Cisco proprietary) signalling protocol. Both LACP and PAGP protocols are supported by IP.

This feature allows:

• Detection of failure of logical groups. When there is a signal failure or a failure in all of the discrete connections, then a single Down problem is reported on the LAG.

• Discovery of peer port connectivity and Logical Group connectivity in Cisco devices.

  Note:

  This is true even when the neighbor discovery protocol is not enabled.

• Detection of traffic load imbalance among ports that participate in an aggregation. Generates the event UnbalancedAdapterUtilization for AggregatePort when traffic load is relatively imbalanced.

• Chapter 1 in Smarts IP Manager Reference Guide provides more information on how the this event is calculated.