topic Re: Bond Interface Copper & Fiber in Firewall and Security Management

Bond Interface Copper & Fiber

thant — Mon, 15 Aug 2022 13:18:41 GMT

Is it possible to have copper and fiber as part of the same port-channel group?

Re: Bond Interface Copper & Fiber

Chris_Atkinson — Mon, 15 Aug 2022 23:29:17 GMT

Generally should be OK as long as the interface speeds are the same. (Will also depend on the adjacent device).

Re: Bond Interface Copper & Fiber

Bob_Zimmerman — Mon, 15 Aug 2022 14:41:09 GMT

It generally works even if the interface speeds aren't the same. Let's say you have a 1g copper interface and a 10g fiber interface bonded. With LACP, round-robin, or XOR load distribution, it works as if all the interfaces in the bond were the same speed as the slowest. You can get an aggregate throughput of 2g. Maybe a little more if your flows happen to be distributed such that the big flows get hashed to the 10g link, but that's down to luck.

With active/standby load distribution, you can get 10g, but if that link fails, suddenly it's limited to 1g, which probably isn't a suitable backup. Even this can be okay, if you're moving from an all-1g bond to an all-10g bond, for example.

Re: Bond Interface Copper & Fiber

JozkoMrkvicka — Mon, 15 Aug 2022 19:10:27 GMT

In addition to what other said, you can form bond port-channel with only single interface. If you are short on free interfaces and would like to get rid of topology work everytime during HW replacement, just use bonds for everything (also for management and sync traffic). You are able to add another slave(s) to the existing bond with no problem.