EtherChannel in Packet Tracer 6.2 - Part 1

ether channel is now included in the CCNA certification exam and is part of the new CCNA curriculum in this demonstration I'm going to work with either channel and configure it on my switches I'm using packet tracer 6.2 for this demonstration if you'd like to follow along and you have packet tracer 6.2 then you can download this file that I'm working from from my website you'll find the link to the web page in the description below the video so what is ether channel ether channel is a technology that allows you to take multiple switch ports on your switch and bundle them together into one logical interface the benefit is that you can get more bandwidth for your up links that go from switch to switch or from switch let's say to a server so if I bundle like in this example on s1 here to s3 I've taken four links I've got four Fast Ethernet connections here on four switch ports and I'm going to bundle them together into one logical interface so I'll be getting quadruple my bandwidth so instead of a hundred megabits between s1 and s3 I'll get four hundred megabits between the two switches this can be really useful if your network is bottlenecking and you need more bandwidth but you can't necessarily afford new switches or faster switches then you could bundle links together and double your bandwidth or in this case quadruple in all so not only can you increase bandwidth between switches you can even use ether channel between a switch and a server so for instance with this server right here if I look at it I've actually put a second network interface card into the server so now I have to nix so if I could run ether channel on my NICs on this server then I could have two connections to switch s3 and I could get double the bandwidth from my server let's say to my switch so let's say just like that so with two links acting as one I could get double the bandwidth from the server to the network now your Nix your Ethernet NICs gigabit or Fast Ethernet whatever they are on your server will need to be able to support ether channel for this to work now in packet tracer I don't believe I can do this with the server so it's just an example but we can in packet tracer configure ether channel between the switches and bundle these links together into logical interfaces not only does ether channel improve throughput and bandwidth on your up links or to your servers it also adds redundancy in that if a either channel link if a single link fails for instance if gigabit 0/1 were to fail we still have gigabit 0/2 so the ether channel stays up so that provides redundancy between your switches and from your switches to your servers so you can bundle up to eight switch ports into an ether channel or port channel and it's recommended to not have more than six separate ether channel bundles / switch I'm also going to use this opportunity to explore some of the different ways that you can configure ether Channel so in this scenario the way I've laid it out is that between switch 1 s1 and switch 2 s2 I'm using the two gigabit interfaces and I want to bundle those together into one ether channel interface not to do this I'm going to use LACP and LACP is the link aggregation control protocol it's an open standard maintained by the I Triple E at the original specification 802 3 ad and I believe the new specification is 802 2.1 ax so link aggregation control protocol can be used on non cisco devices to do ether channel so in this case i'm going i'm using cisco devices obviously this is package sir but Cisco supports LACP so we can configure this ether channel link between s1 and s2 using LACP between s2 and s3 will use port aggregation protocol which is a cisco proprietary protocol and the acronym pagp here we'll use it with for Fast Ethernet links going from s2 to s3 will bundle them together into one logical interface and get quadruple the bandwidth then lastly between s1 and s3 you see that I have the four links we're going to bundle them together into one link and for this we're going to just use ether channel but we're going to do it with a manual configuration so LACP and pagp are protocols which will negotiate which switch ports can join the ether channel based on compatible configurations if there's an incompatible configuration the switch port won't be allowed to join the ether channel now ether channel manual mode is a manual mode where there's no negotiations and the switch ports are automatically forced into the ether channel and it's a little trickier because if you have a miss configuration it could cause the ether channel not to work or to fail to test everything will have PC - in PC 3 and PC 0 and PC 1 pcz ro and PC 2 you can see are on VLAN 10 they have a 192 168 10 dot 100 address and a 1 92168 10.1 50 address and so they should be able to communicate with each other on VLAN 10 and pc1 & pc2 communicate with each other on VLAN 20 and then we can play with our ether channels to observe the operation and test the scenario so let's get started configuring it I'll start with switch s1 and configure the connection between s1 and s2 so we'll start with that the connection between s1 and s2 I'll open s1 type enable compte to get to global configuration mode and set the hostname to s1 now the first thing I need to do is configure the VLANs and the switch ports in the VLANs for the PCs so I'll quickly create VLAN 10 VLAN 20 PC zero is connected to switch port 1 so I'll say interface F 0 / 1 and change it switchport mode access and then switch port access VLAN 10 and then PC one is in VLAN 20 so I'll go into interface 10 and do an up arrow to do switch port mode access and then switch port access VLAN 20 so now port 1 is in VLAN 10 port 10 is in VLAN 20 I've got my two VLANs and so the PCs are now connected to switch ports that are in the respective VLANs now we're going to set up our port channel which is LACP we're going to do link aggregation control protocol on gigabit 0 1 and 0 2 and I'm going to do that first so the gigabit connections going to s 2 so for that I'll say interface range gigabit 0 / 1 - 2 to go into the gigabit 1 & 2 interfaces and then I'll type channel - group 1 mode and then put a question mark so you can see here I've chosen channel group I've given it a number 1 and the modes that are available you can see here that we have active which will enable LACP unconditionally we have the opposite of active which would be passive which will enable LACP only if another LACP device that it's connected to is in active state so we can either have if we want to do LACP we can either make it active or passive I'm going to use active and we're doing LACP so that's what I'm going to focus on right now so I'll set this switch s1 s gigabit interfaces to active and then on s2 all set them to passive so that sounds good active all right and you can see now that I get an output message to the console saying that the interface is both went down and then both have now come up now all I need to do to get this ether channel connection finished is to go to the other switch and configure it now let's take a look though first at our running configuration here so I'll do a control see show run we'll take a look at it so you can see here in the running configuration that gigabit zero one there's my channel Group one mode active gigabit zero to channel group one mode active and by doing that you can see that it created interface port channel one so this is the logical interface this port channel one the logical interface for both of my Gigabit Ethernet interfaces so now if I want to turn this logical connection this logical interface that goes from s1 to s2 and configure it as a trunk I'll do my configurations from now on on the port Channel and that's what I'm going to do right now so I'll say get back into global configuration mode say interface port channel one and I'll turn it into a trunk and then all after that I'll say switch port trunk allowed VLAN 10 comma 20 so now if once again I go back and look at my running configuration show run and we take a look at the configuration you can see now that I've configured port channel 1 interface port channel 1 which is the logical grouping of gigabit 0 1 & 0 2 with the switch port mode trunk command and the switch port trunk allowed VLANs 10 and 20 and you can see that actually the commands transferred over to the individual Gigabit Ethernet interfaces so the best way to configure this now is if you want to alter and change this this ether channel link or this port channel link the best way to do it is to put your configurations right on the port channel then the changes will be reflected on the individual interfaces if you try to do it vice versa and configure the individual interfaces it won't be reflected on the port Channel and you'll probably run into problems and getting it to work so I'm going to leave that there and now it's time to go to s 2 so now I'll go to s 2 and I'm going to do something very similar on s 2 I'll go in I'll set the hostname I'll create my VLANs I'll set the VLANs on the respective interfaces so now I've created both VLANs VLAN 10 VLAN 20 switch port 1 put it in VLAN 10 switch port 10 put it in VLAN 20 and now I'm ready to configure my ether channel with LACP so I'll say interface range gigabit 0 / 1 - 2 to get into both gigabit interfaces I'll put in the command channel - Group 1 mode passive and you can see that the interfaces go down and then come back up now that that's done I can go directly into interface port - channel 1 turn it into a trunk and then put the allowed VLANs you can see that instead of typing out switchport I just type SW which is shortened and the the iOS will automatically complete the command for me and you can see as soon as I've done that and I have the compatible configuration line protocol and interface port channel one change state two up so there's a few important rules that you need to follow when working with ether channel and one of the rules is you need a compatible configuration on opposite ends of the link so a couple the rules are if you're going to be using gigabit interfaces you need to use both interfaces gigabit I can't have one gigabit interface and one fast ethernet interface also similarly I can't have differing configurations on opposite ends of the link so I can't have a trunk on one side with VLAN 10 and 20 and the trunk on the other side with VLAN 30 and 40 that needs to be identical configurations on either side now as far as the VLANs go and the trunk or access port and those types of configurations now for the for the channel group if I want to use LACP the best way to do it is to choose one side to be the active and the other side to be the passive and now they're communicating with each other and if one of the links was to go down LACP will manage this port channel and will keep the link up so for instance if I was to lose one of these links the ether Channel would stay up even with only one connection if one went bad it would still stay up that's because LACP is managing and maintaining the virtual interface and would be able to keep that up so I'll put this back once again you can't have a mixed switch ports here they have to both be gigabit interfaces can have a gigabit and a fast ethernet okay so LACP is up we'll take a look now I'll do a show ether channel question mark here let's do a summary and you can see pork channel one protocol LACP the ports gigabit 0 1 and 0 2 you can see that let's see here P and I then we can look at the legend here P port channel i standalone su in use s layer 2 so this is a layer 2 ether channel connection you can do layer 3 ether channel but to do that you need a multi-layer switch like a Cisco 35 60 series switch where you could do multiple links and create an ether channel on a layer 3 interface if you had a layer 3 switch so you could have multiple connections but just one IP address on the link if you had that so anyway this is up it looks good let's see if we can ping across from PC 0 to PC 2 and you can see I'm getting a reply and looks like it's working nicely alright time to configure pagp port channel 2 between s2 and s3

Channel: danscourses

Views: 122,921

Keywords: EtherChannel, LACP, PAgP, danscourses, Cisco, CCNA, Packet Tracer

Id: lLnilT_WOmI

Length: 17min 49sec (1069 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 17 2015