What is link aggregation and its importance in networking? (with configuration steps)

Mar 09 , 2024 1383

In today's era, with the continuous expansion of the network scale, network users for the performance of the main link, bandwidth and reliability put forward more and more high demand. In the traditional technology, if you need to increase the bandwidth must spend a high cost to replace the interface board to support higher speeds, which undoubtedly brings unnecessary economic losses to the enterprise. In order to solve these problems, a new technology is needed to realize this demand, so the link aggregation technology came into being.

Link aggregation technology can increase link bandwidth and throughput without hardware upgrades by bundling multiple physical interfaces into one logical interface.

In addition to this, link aggregation improves the reliability of the network, so that when one physical link fails, data can still be transmitted over other links that are working properly. This redundancy design reduces the impact of network failures on services and improves network availability.

Moreover, link aggregation can also spread data traffic over multiple physical links for transmission, thus avoiding the situation where one link is overloaded and achieving load balancing. It can also maximize the utilization of network resources and improve the overall performance of the network by dynamically adjusting the distribution of data traffic.

For administrators, link aggregation simplifies network management and maintenance, reduces configuration and management complexity, lowers operating costs, and improves network management efficiency.

So, in general, what kind of scenarios is link aggregation used more often?

First, link aggregation is widely used in data center networks to provide data centers with high-bandwidth and high-availability data transmission channels. Through link aggregation, data centers can achieve fast data exchange between servers to meet the demand for large-scale data processing and storage.

Second, in enterprise networks, link aggregation is usually used for link connections between switches and routers as a way to manage traffic in the enterprise network, improve the bandwidth and reliability of the network, and enhance the user experience.

Finally, in an ISP's network, link aggregation can be used to connect network links between different regions or different data centers, to achieve parallel transmission of multiple physical links, to meet the demand for high-speed, high-availability network connectivity, and to improve the speed and reliability of data transmission.

When we need to use link aggregation to solve the problem of network bandwidth, it is particularly important to master the configuration method of link aggregation. The following is the Huawei link aggregation configuration method organized by the net degree of communication engineers for everyone, the need for friends remember to collect!

1.Create Eth-Trunk interfaces on SwitchA and SwitchB and add member interfaces

[SwitchA] interface eth-trunk 1 //create Eth-Trunk interface with ID 1

[SwitchA-Eth-Trunk1] trunkport gigabitethernet 1/0/1 to 1/0/2 // Add two member interfaces GE1/0/1 to GE1/0/2 to the Eth-Trunk1 interface.

[SwitchA-Eth-Trunk1] quit

[SwitchB] interface eth-trunk 1 //create Eth-Trunk interface with ID 1

[SwitchB-Eth-Trunk1] trunkport gigabitethernet 1/0/1 to 1/0/2 // Add three member interfaces from GE1/0/1 to GE1/0/2 to the Eth-Trunk1 interface.

[SwitchB-Eth-Trunk1] quit

2.Create VLAN10 and VLAN20 and add Eth-Trunk interfaces respectively. the configuration of SwitchB is similar to that of SwitchA and will not be repeated.

[SwitchA] vlan batch 10 20

[SwitchA] interface eth-trunk 1

[SwitchA-Eth-Trunk1] port link-type trunk //Set the interface link type to trunk, the interface default link type is not trunk port.

[SwitchA-Eth-Trunk1] port trunk allow-pass vlan 10 20

[SwitchA-Eth-Trunk1] quit

Overall, in modern networks, link aggregation is widely used in data centers, enterprise networks, and ISP networks to improve their network bandwidth, reliability, and scalability, providing important support for network development and optimization