Etherchannel in a Nutshell: Understanding and Configuring the Cisco Technology

Ever feel like your internet connection isn’t as fast as you think it could be? Along with that, shouldn’t there be a way to create fault tolerance between your computers and the internet in the case that one of your cables happens to go bad? Fortunately for you, there is a way to kill two birds with one stone. It’s called EtherChannel, an easily-configurable technology used primarily on Cisco switches.

Etherchannel allows the grouping of multiple, physical Ethernet links into one logical link. This provides both increased bandwidth as well as fault tolerance between your routers, switches, servers, hosts, etc. Each Etherchannel can consist of between two and eight Fast Ethernet, Gigabit, or 10 Gigabit Ethernet channels. This means that, depending on how many Ethernet links you create, you can create multiplied bandwidth as well as fault tolerance without losing connection on your newly created, grouped Ethernet link.

For example, let’s say you have two Cisco switches, both which have four Gigabit Ethernet ports. You have already established connectivity using one Gigabit port on each switch, but users are saying it is taking them too long to transport large, necessary files to each other. Each of our switches has 3 additional Gigabit Ethernet ports, but unfortunately all they are doing right now is collecting dust. Creating 3 additional physical Gigabit Ethernet links allow us to group these all together into one logical link using Etherchannel to multiple our original Gigabit speed by four AND create backup links at the same time in case one of them fails! So in essence, our previous bandwidth of 1 Gbps is now 4 Gbps including fault tolerance!!!

For additional information on the subject, please refer to the following links:

Cisco EtherChannel Technology

Configuring EtherChannel