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Trunking between RiverStone RS/3000 and ExtremeWare Summit/400

Posted on 2005-01-21 10:59:36, modified on 2006-01-09 16:29:22
Tags: Networking

We have a ExtremeWare Summit/400 gigabit ethernet switch/router and a RiverStone RS/3000 fast ethernet switch/router. When using a single ethernet cable between the two, we often peaked at 80-90% utilisation and therefor added more ethernet cables and trunked them into one big virtual ethernet cable.

The configuration statements

Configuration on the RiverStone RS/3000:

smarttrunk add ports et.1.3 to st.1
smarttrunk add ports et.1.4 to st.1
smarttrunk add ports et.1.11 to st.1
smarttrunk add ports et.1.12 to st.1
smarttrunk create st.1 protocol no-protocol
!
vlan add ports st.1 to rss-summit
vlan create rss-summit port-based id 17
!

And on the ExtremeWare Summit/400

configure sharing address-based ip-source-dest
create vlan "summit-rss"
configure vlan "summit-rss" ipaddress 10.192.98.2 255.255.255.0
configure vlan "summit-rss" add port 5 untagged
enable sharing 5 grouping 5,6,7,8

The commands to check if the status of the trunks

For the RS/3000:

barnet-core-sjh# port show port-status st.1

Flags: M - Mirroring enabled  B - MLP Bundle  S - SmartTRUNK port P - Configured as 802.1p
                                                     Negot- IFG   Link  Admin 
Port         Port Type             Duplex Speed      iation Value State State Flags
----         ---------             ------ -----      ------ ----- ----- ----- -----
st.1         SmartTRUNK             n/a    n/a        n/a         Up   
 et.1.3  10/100-Mbit Ethernet   Full   100 Mbits  Auto        Up    Up    
 et.1.4  10/100-Mbit Ethernet   Full   100 Mbits  Auto        Up    Up    
 et.1.11 10/100-Mbit Ethernet   Full   100 Mbits  Auto        Up    Up    
 et.1.12 10/100-Mbit Ethernet   Full   100 Mbits  Auto        Up    Up    

And for the Summit400

Summit400-48t:27 # show ports configuration
Port Configuration Monitor                            Fri Jan 21 00:14:31 2005
Port         Port    Link  Auto    Speed       Duplex    Flow  Ld Share Media
             State  Status Neg   Cfg Actual  Cfg Actual  Ctrl   Master Pri  Red
================================================================================
trunk-rss-1   ENABLED  A   ON    AUTO   100   AUTO FULL     NONE     5 UTP
trunk-rss-2   ENABLED  A   ON    AUTO   100   AUTO FULL     NONE     5 UTP
trunk-rss-3   ENABLED  A   ON    AUTO   100   AUTO FULL     NONE     5 UTP
trunk-rss-4   ENABLED  A   ON    AUTO   100   AUTO FULL     NONE     5 UTP

To see the utilisation

On the RS/3000

barnet-core-sjh# smarttrunk show distribution st.1
SmartTRUNK  Member       % Link Utilization Link Status Grp Status
----------  -----------  -----------------  ----------- ----------
st.1        et.1.3                    30.40 Forwarding  Up
st.1        et.1.4                    33.03 Forwarding  Up
st.1        et.1.11                   29.55 Forwarding  Up
st.1        et.1.12                   25.30 Forwarding  Up

On the Summit/400

Summit400-48t:29 # show ports stats
Port Statistics                                       Fri Jan 21 00:21:46 2005
Port  Link      Tx Pkt     Tx Byte       Rx Pkt     Rx Byte      Rx        Rx
      Status    Count      Count         Count      Count        Bcast     Mcast
================================================================================
trunk-rss-1   A     3863921   319130686      260162    32668772       0       0
trunk-rss-2   A     1240651   120939628      323512    41293811       0       0
trunk-rss-3   A      902577   102275906      413173    49910620       0       0
trunk-rss-4   A     1323322   156944892      549445    65218016       1   45830

Differences in physical cable selections

Both the RS/3000 and Summit/400 have different algorithms for choosing the physical cable the ethernet packet goes over:

The RS/3000 selects on stream: That is the combination of IP address of source and destination and the TCP/UDP port (if it are TCP or UDP packets). If the data is coming from the RS/3000, having multiple streams of data flowing between the computers would fully utilise the trunked ports.

The Summit/400 selects on source and destination IP address. If the data is coming from the Summit/400, having multiple streams of data flowing between the computers would utilise one cable between the Summit/400 and the RS/3000 .

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