Load balancing distribution

Understanding issues related to load balancing requires some basic knowledge of the criteria used by load balancing algorithms.

The following table provides details for each feature that provides load balancing.

Table 1. Load balancing algorithms

Feature

Algorithm

Port-channels

Provides adaptive load balancing based on up to seven criteria (7-tuple), depending upon what fields are available in the frame.

Trunk

Provides equal packet load balancing (round-robin) among member links.

Under multiple port-channel hops, if confronted with both underutilized and overloaded interfaces, try changing the hashing scheme on one hop to avoid such traffic polarization.