EtherChannel may be a strategy utilized in Cisco switches to total transmission capacity from different switch ports. Another word for this method is bundling. On a Cisco switch you'll be able bundle two to eight ports. An example is the photo over. Two switch ports have been bundled together to put through to another switch. An illustration would be bundling eight quick ethernet ports. Each harbour is 100 Mbps. Increase 100 Mbps by eight and you get 800 Mbps. On the off chance that these were all full duplex ports you'd get 100 Mbps of bidirectional activity for each harbour totaling up to 1600 Mbps (8 x 200 Mbps) of amassed transmission capacity. In the event that these were gigabit ports you may get up to 16 Gbps (8 x 2 Gbps). When ports are put into the same EtherChannel they are considered bundled. To bundle ports, they must meet the taking after necessities:

- Same Ethernet media

- Same VLAN

- Same duplex and speed

If the bundle is going to be a trunk:

- Bundled ports must be in a trunking mode

- Same native VLAN

- Pass the same set of VLANs

- Same duplex and speed

Benefits

Aside from amassing transfer speed, another advantage with EtherChannel is excess. In case one of the ports within the bundle goes down, the other ports will need to choose up the slack. As a result you're utilizing EtherChannel, you're able to stack adjust the activity over different ports.

Port Aggregation Protocols

When configuring EtherChannel you have the choice of using two protocols:

- Link Aggregation Control Protocol

- Port Aggregation Protocol (PAgP)

LACP is an alternative to PAgP and it is a standard (802.3ad).

PAgP is a Cisco proprietary protocol. It isn't used much anymore.

 
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