Question

Q1. What is the main purpose of EtherChannel ?

Q2. What are some of the advantages of EtherChannel?

Q3. How will STP work differently if EtherChannel we configured compared to STP working when EtherChannel is NOT configured?

Q4. How many ways can you configure EtherChannel? Q5. What are port requirements for EtherChannel?

Q6. How many maximum ports can be combined as one in EtherChannel?

Q7. Why do you use interface range command when configuring Etherchannel?

Q8. Can you configure EtherChannel without using the interface range command?

Q9. Is the redundancy increased after configuring EtherChannel?

Q10. Is the ip traffic increased after configuring EtherChannel?

Answer 1

1. Main purpose : EtherChannel is used to aggregate bandwidth between multiple L2/L3 interfaces and it also increases bandwidth and provides redundancy by aggregating individual links between switches.

2. Advantages :

(a) Most configuration tasks can be done on the etherchannel interface instead of on each individual port, ensuring configuration consistency throughout links.

(b) EtherChannel relies oon existing switch ports.

(c) There is no need to upgrade the link to a faster and expensive connection to have more bandwidth.

3. When etherChannel is configured, STP makes all the links as a single one and BPDUs are only sent down to one of the links.

When etherChannel is not configured, STP makes all the links to shutdown any switches between them until one connection goes down.

4. There are 6 ways of etherChannel configurations:

LACP, PAgP and ON

Layer, two and three

Miss-configuration

Negotiation on link

Step by step configuration

5. Port requirements: the speed/velocity of the ports should be set to fast/gigabit. And also make sure that all the ports are enabled and none should be given a shutdown command.

6. Maximum number of ports : 8 ports.

7. We use the interface range command in etherChannel command to configure a port channel as LACP. and it also brings the interface range prompt denoted by " switch(config-if-range)#".

8. yes, you can configure etherchannel without using interface range command.

9. yes, the redundancy gets increased.

10. No, the ip traffic is not increased.