Allied Telesis AT-S41 - Manual (Page 67)

AT-S41 User’s Guide
67
Port Trunking Overview
Port trunking is an economical way for you to increase the bandwidth
between two Ethernet switches.
A port trunk can consist of up to four 10/100 Mbps ports or two
10/100/1000 Mbps ports that have been grouped together to function
as one logical path. A port trunk increases the bandwidth between
switches and can be useful in situations where a single physical data link
between switches is insufficient to handle the traffic load.
The port trunk always sends packets from a particular source to a
particular destination over the same link within the trunk. A single link is
designated for flooding broadcasts and packets of unknown destination.
Observe the following guidelines when creating a port trunk:
❑ An AT-8350GB master switch in a stack can support up to seven
port trunks at a time. An AT-8350GB slave switch in a stack can
support up to six port trunks at a time.
❑ A port trunk can consist of up to four 10/100 Mbps ports or two
10/100/1000 Mbps ports.
❑ The ports on the master switch are divided into seven port trunk
groups. The port members of each port group are shown below:
Port Group 1: ports 1-8
Port Group 2: ports 9-16
Port Group 3: ports 17-24
Port Group 4: ports 25-32
Port Group 5: ports 33-40
Port Group 6: ports 41-48
Port Group 7: ports 49-50
❑ The ports of a port trunk must be within the same port trunk
group.
❑ The ports of a port trunk must reside on the same switch in a stack.
❑ Slave switches in a switch stack only have the first six port trunk
groups. The two 10/100/1000 Mbps ports on AT-8350GB slave
switches cannot belong to a port trunk.
❑ The ports of a port trunk must be of the same type. For example,
they can be all twisted pair ports or all fiber optic ports.
❑ When ports are added to a port trunk group, flow control is