Ether Channel

Do you need further bandwidth on your network devices but do not have the bigger bandwidth interfaces on your factual network devices that you can use? Here you will to learn all about ether channels and link aggregation (it's basically the same thing) and how they can be used to expand your bandwidth immensely and make your network.

Fig 1: Ether Channel 

Explained

So first of all understanding ether channels or link aggregations they're sometimes called depending on the manufacturer of the deices that you're dealing with and the company that you're working for (they may be called ether channels they may be called link aggregations but) understanding them requires you to suppose of a computer network like a sophisticated plumbing or looking at municipality business. 

What do I mean by that? If you look at the flux of data on a network like water in pipes or like motorcars on roads and highways in a municipality you can easily see why link aggregations or ether channels are used and demanded.

So that's the first generality you need to look at to understand them. suppose of a network like a set of pipes in plumbing or like a bunch of expressways or highways in a municipality. Secondly if you have network devices (switches, routers, etc.) that only have certain speed and bandwidths on their physical interfaces in other words they can only go at a certain speed on each interface- but you need farther bandwidth on certain connections say between a switch and another switch or between two network devices. You need farther bandwidth on those connections to keep the data and the business from actually doing what they call bottlenecking which is the same as if you're dealing with traffic. However, it nearly comes to a complete stop until all of that business can filter through one lane of business so you don't want bottle necking so you may want to increase the bandwidth on certain connections to keep that bottlenecking from passing, If business all backups and I'll say a construction zone is all bottlenecked down to one single lane.

You can total or either channel multiple physical interfaces together into a" bigger" and I'm going to put that in citations a" bigger" interface or pipe. Each physical interface in that ether channel is like a single lane on the trace but the trace has multiple lanes. So the lanes are the physical interfaces in the ether channel that you configure on each device facing each other and the ether channel is like the trace itself. Network devices will use one of those lanes or one of those connections if you're using network cabling generally that's the case you're they're going to use one network string in that ether channel primarily until farther business flux is necessary or farther bandwidth is demanded. also they will start using the other lanes or the interfaces or the lines in between to give farther bandwidth.

Now keep in mind that the ether channel is considered a LOGICAL interface and is only seen by the configured devices using them as a single BIG interface containing multiple physical interfaces configured into it. Not several physical connections that are actually seen when you physically look at a networking device. Like let's say you have two lines running between two switches on both of those switches you configure those two interfaces into the same ether channel on both. The switches as one single big ether channel interface. They don't see them as two separate connections presently so that's kind of how you want to look at that when it comes to networking.