I’ve had a lot of discussions with clients about the behavior of Port-Channel interfaces and their associated physical counterparts. It’s necessary for many parameters of the physical and logical interfaces to be the same. Here’s the behavior within NX-OS and the preferred way that I make changes to EtherChannels.
In this, we’re going to continue working with the logical interface Po100 and the physical interfaces Eth1/19 and Eth1/20 which will be in the EtherChannel. (more…)
I prefer to use port-channel interfaces for the fabric interfaces when connecting fabric extenders (FEXs). If a single interface in the bundle fails, it won’t remove the fabric extender interface – it simply reduces it’s bandwidth. This results in stable, predictable, redundant and resilient behavior. Let’s prove this point. (more…)
What happens when more links are associated with an FEX than are permitted in the max-links parameter? Let’s find out…
If you’re wondering what an FEX is, check out this article: http://www.cciezone.com/?p=231.
FEXs are connected to the parent switch(es) via fabric interfaces. These are 10Gbps interfaces which connect the two switches (think of a stacking cable on a 3750-series switch).
There are two methods of configuring fabric interfaces:
Although these are somewhat differentiated in some of the documentation, the static pinning looks almost the same as that used for EtherChannels. The main difference is that static pinning uses physical interfaces, whereas EtherChannel uses a single Port-Channel interface for the fabric interface (there are some minor configuration differences and requirements as shown below).
The Nexus 5000-series (5010 and 5020) support the Nexus 2000-series of switches. The Nexus 2000-series are fabric extenders (FEXs) – which is essentially a way to stretch out the N5k switch fabric. Currently there’s only the Nexus 2148T switch, which we’ll cover (at least the basics) in this article.
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