Creating a Link Aggregation Group (LAG) in FTOS

This lab demonstrates how to create a Link Aggregation Group (LAG) in FTOS on Force10 switches. A LAG in Force10’s FTOS is called a port channel and in Cisco’s IOS is called an EtherChannel. As described by IEEE 802.3ad, LAG is a mechanism for combining the bandwidth of multiple physical ports in a switch into one logical link. Therefore, a port channel can be treated as an individual port and can be configured as such (ex: can be set as Layer 2 or Layer 3, can be part of a VLAN, etc.).

It is important to remember that the members (interfaces) of the port channel can only have very little configuration. For example, if the interface is a member of a port channel, it can only have the following commands configured:

• – description
• – shutdown/no shutdown
• – mtu (if the interface is on a Jumbo-enabled line card and the chassis is in Jumbo mode.)
• – ip mtu (if the interface is on an E-Series jumbo-enabled line card and the chassis is in jumbo mode.)

In this lab I’m going to use a Force10 S25P switch [FTOS 8.4.2.1] and a Force10 S50V switch [FTOS 8.4.2.1]. I have used fiber optic cable to connect GigabitEthernet 2/1 of the S25P with the GigabitEthernet 0/47 of the S50V. I have also done the same with GigabitEthernet 2/2 of the S25P and GigabitEthernet 0/48 of the S50V. These are both 1 Gigabit connections. Now, to create a port channel simple follow these two steps:

• 1. Create amd enable a port channel on both switches

• 2. Add members (interfaces) to the port channel

Note, that the interfaces added to the port channel were in switchport mode and enabled before I created the port channel. I did not display this above. As you can see above, I assigned an IP to each port channel so I can test the final setup by pinging. Below you can see I ping the IP of each port channel from the opposite switch and all works fine.



Note, by default FTOS port channels are static so they do not use Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) to automatically negotiate port channel connections with similarly configured ports on adjacent machines.

If you want to use LACP and are connecting to ports on other machines that are also running LACP, set each port to LACP as you configure it. So under each interface, you would have used the following commands:

port-channel-protocol LACP
port-channel 1 mode active