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Can ports in Trunk be equally utilized for Load Balancing?

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fabric-interconnect-and-management-switches
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brocade
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Applies to

  • Brocade
  • Trunk

Answer

  • No, they wont be equally utilized.
  • Its an expected behaviour of trunked connections showing single port as highly utilized.
  • The load balancing is not intended to be even.
  • The behavior is to poll a trunk link to see if it is busy and if not use that link to send frames for as long as that link is not busy.
  • When the link is found busy, poll the next link in the trunk to see if it is busy and if not, use that link and continue to use that link while it is not busy.
  • Therefore, the frame distribution pattern can depend on load - meaning, a highly loaded trunk would be more likely to see even distribution because, on a link poll, it will find the current link busy and have to move on to the next.
  • On a low-loaded trunk, when polling a link for use, it is less likely to need to move on to a different trunk link resulting in an uneven distribution of transmitted frames across the trunk's links.
  • In most cases, the load will vary considerably over time, depending on active frame flows, and so there is no expectation of even distribution.
  • The 100% utilized link will not be used further for more frame transmission and hence there wont be any congestion related issues.

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