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Home > Archive > CCNP > July 2000 > BCMSN question
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| I'm a little confused on this topic of STP. STP is an auto protocol that switches use to avoid loops when there are redundant loops ok, but, now i might be wrong, but what if you have load balancing as if you had two connections to your core. As you can see i'm a little bit confused i'm only up to chapter 2 in the BCMSN book, so maybe i will get an answer as i read on. Or, is load balancing able to be made on High end switches or is that just a router feature??? thanks. | |
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| Keep reading, that can be confusing but at least the CiscoPress book does explain it.
Yankee | |
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| I felt a little guilty about my short answer last time so let me add a little more...
You are exactly right that STP prevents loops in a switched network and you are astute to be concerned about load balancing being a concern.
Cisco addresses this concern with "EtherChannel". You may also hear it called "Fast EtherChannel" or "Gigabit EtherChannel". These allow for redundant links by having STP treat them as a single link.
You will find this later in your book but you may want to skip ahead and take a peek at it now since you are thinking about it.
Yankee | |
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| Ok, thanks, i do understand the Etherchannel part of it. NOw it makes sense i actually was just reasking my question in a different way, but then i read your answer again and it does make sense. THanks alot, so lets say a 4503 switch with 2 GBIC ports. Configure GigEtherchannel and they will both be used to go from Access layer to Distrib/Core layer. Then there is no redundancy if those links are lost. right? so you would need 4 GBIC interf. would 1 take over if one link is dropped?? THanks know you have me thinking more. I will keep on reading  | |
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| If both (all) links in the EtherChannel went down, yes you would be down, but if only one link went down the EtherChannel is still up and you would continue to pass traffic. STP would not have to rerun because as far as it sees that "one" link is still up and there has been no change in the network.
Yankee | |
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| ok thats what i kind of though, great thanks alot, i appreciate your help, more will be posted as it arrives, hopefully we can help each other by asking questions pass this test. |
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