HP APA - Newbie with questions...

[Gene Laoyan]

System: HP rx8640
OS: HP-UX 11.23

I have a few questions on the Auto Port Aggregation software we purchased. We want to use it to pool our physical nics into one large aggregate so here's my questions...

1) If we configure it to "Pool" our 4 physical nic's, what happens if one nic has a hardware failure? Does it it take down the whole aggregate?

2) We use Cisco switches. (I'm not a Cisco anything so that's all I know about the switches) If we configure APA to "Pool" our nics, what do we need to configure on the Cicso switches? If any.

3) If configured to "Pool" the nics, does this mean the data is "Fanned out" across all nics and mean we have a 4Gbit NIC?



Thanks

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

1) No, APA continues to use the remains NIC's; it actually provides redundancy and increased bandwidth.

2) First, check that your switch is APA compatible (the list is in the documentation) but I would expect anything Cisco newer than 5-6 years (and probably longer) is compatible. The instructions for the switch settings are in the documenation as well.

3) Yes, provided that the host/application can actually use that much bandwidth.

[Gene Laoyan]

OK thanks.
Do you have a link to where I can download the documentation? I do not have the CD with me ritght now.
Also, this link (http://docs.hp.com/en/J4240-90033/ch01s08.html)has some info I would like to see but all the images do not come up.

Thanks

[A. Clay Stephenson]

These links worked for me:

http://docs.hp.com/en/J4240-90035/J4240-90035.pdf

http://docs.hp.com/en/J4240-90034/J4240-90034.pdf

Though a bit old, this one explains APA rather well:

http://docs.hp.com/en/785/apa_final.pdf


and the parent page:
http://docs.hp.com/en/netcom.html#Auto%20Port%20Aggregation%20%28APA%29

[Gene Laoyan]

OK, Thank you!

[rick jones]

While you have a "nic" with an aggregate bandwidth of 4 Gbit, any one "flow" through the aggregate will be limited to 1 Gbit/s. Individual flows are never split across links in an aggregate. To do so invites packet reordering which can result in poor performance.