is odd number of links in lag group ok

Tue May 15 15:28:11 UTC 2018

On 15/May/18 17:20, Jared Mauch wrote:

> Much of this depends on the hardware, software and what hashing is used inbound
> outbound traffic directions, etc.
>
> It will likely work the way you expect, but one may be warmer than the other if
> traffic ends up overloading a single bucket in the hash.

We haven't had a major issue when loading traffic over even or odd
links. If you have decent hardware and software, it should all be fine,
particularly if your traffic is all or mostly IP.

If you've got non-IP traffic in there, and your box cannot look into the
payload to determine entropy, then things could get interesting. But
this will happen even when you have even links... it's not anything
specific to how many member links you have in the LAG, but rather, the
router's need to maintain per-flow load balancing with limited
information beyond Layer 2 data.

That said, an even number of links just leaves the warm & fuzzies turned
on :-)...

Mark.