HP Auto Port Aggregation Administrator's Guide HP-UX 11i v3 (766140-001, March 2014)

Figure 3 Sample Router and Server Configuration (No Switch)
HP APA 2-4 Port
Link Aggregation
IntranetIntranet
Router or
Switching Router
Internet or large enterprise environments using routers
You can use HP APA link aggregation successfully in certain environments employing routers. You
must be careful because a particular router might not have a load balancing capability. Additionally,
switches employed between the server employing HP APA and the router inject another level of
complexity that you must analyze before determining that the environment is a candidate for HP
APA link aggregations.
Figure 3 (page 18) shows a sample router and server configuration with no switch. This configuration
makes the following assumptions:
• The router or switching router connected to the server provides trunking or load balancing
using an IP address-based load-balancing algorithm.
• There will be many TCP/UDP client connections. The HP APA IP address load-balancing
algorithm provides effective outbound network traffic load balancing, as does the TCP/UDP
port address algorithm. Do not use the MAC address algorithm because all packets transmitted
from the server would contain the same source and destination MAC addresses.
Figure 4 (page 19) shows a sample router and server configuration with a switch. In this
configuration, the switch might present problems because switches typically use a MAC address
load-balancing algorithm. This might make the switch a bottleneck point because the packets from
the router and from the server will contain the same source and destination MAC addresses, thus
defeating the load-balancing algorithm for both inbound and outbound data at the server.
This condition might be acceptable if the load balancing of inbound traffic to the server is not a
concern and the link between the switch and the router has greater bandwidth capacity than the
18 Configuring APA