When to use Trunking

[stevef1]

Hi all, i have a 2 computer rooms with 30 computers in, the computers are spread across 3 switches and a single connection comes from each switch back to the server room HP 4208 switch, this work ok and we dont have problems with it i was thinking of stacking then trunking the switchs is this a good thing to do?

[OLARU Dan]

There's an old saying in the IT world, extracted from the experience of many of your foregoers:

If it's working, don't touch it.

What are you looking to achieve with the change? Better performance? Moving LAN active equipment in one wiring closet? What kind of sitches do you have?

[OLARU Dan]

There's an old saying in the IT world, extracted from the experience of many of your foregoers:

If it's working, don't touch it.

What are you looking to achieve with the change? Better performance? Moving LAN active equipment in one wiring closet? What kind of switches do you have?

[stevef1]

Yes i agree with you if it isnâ t broke then donâ t fix it, i was looking to improve the performance and was wondering if setting up a trunk (with 3 ports) may be the answer

[Rod Hendricks]

Trunking, otherwise known as link aggregration serves 2 purposes - increasing capacity and (more importantly in my experience) increasing availability.

I think the availability increase is awesome. iirc there is virtually no reconvergence time unlike using spanning tree to manage redundant links.

OT
I love the old sayings....if it works don't touch it...that is of course until you lose availability that could have been prevented by a simple 5 min configuration.

[rick jones]

You should look at the utilization of the inter-switch links.

Trunking will increase the _aggregate_ performance but does not (directly) increase the performance of individual flows. So, aggregation will not in and of itself speed-up say an individual FTP transfer, but it can speed-up a set of concurrent FTP transfers.

You also need to consider the structure of the traffic - is is many to many, many to one, that sort of thing, and then look at the packet scheduling algorithms available in the trunking you would be using - will it schedule frames in the aggregate based on MAC address, or IP, or something else?