Connectivity Guide

LACP fallback
LACP fallback allows downstream devices, like Servers, connected to ports of a switch congured as LACP to establish a link when the
system is not able to nalize the LACP handshake.
For example, when servers boot in PXE mode, the server cannot exchange LACP PDUs and the switch does not enable the ports.
Whenever a PXE server reboots, both the port-channel and ports go down. While rebooting, the ports come up, but not the port-channel.
LACP fallback enables the port-channel to be up and keeps sending packets to the PXE server.
When you enable LACP fallback, the switch starts a timer. If the timer expires before LACP completes, then the switch selects one port of
the port group and makes it operational.
You can set the timer using the lacp fallback timeout timer-value command.
The LACP fallback feature adds a member port to LACP port-channel if it does not receive LACP PDUs from the peer for a particular
period of time.
The server uses the fallback port to nalize the PXE-boot process. When the server starts with the OS, the process completes the LACP
handshake and the fallback port re-unites the other members. The member port becomes active and sends packets to the PXE server.
When the switch starts receiving LACP PDU, OS10 ungroups the statically added member port from LACP port-channel and resumes with
normal LACP functionality..
When you enable LACP fallback, the port that comes up is selected based on the following:
• LACP port priority conguration allows deterministic port allocation. The port with the least priority is placed in the active state when a
port-channel is in LACP fallback mode.
• If all the ports in a port-channel have same port priority, the switch internally compares the interface names by base name, module
number, port number, and then selects the lowest one to be active. For example, Ethernet 1 is less than Ethernet 2 and hence Ethernet
1 becomes active.
• In a VLT network, if the interface name is the same on both the VLT peers, then the port in switch with lower system MAC address
becomes active.
Limitations
• OS10 switches cannot be a PXE client irrespective of whether it acts as a VLT peer or ToR switch.
• If you are conguring LACP fallback in a VLT domain, congure lacp fallback commands in both the VLT peers.
• If you do not enable LACP fallback in one of the VLT peers, or congure dierent time-out values in the peers, then the switch might
behave dierently.
• The LACP fallback feature adds or groups a member port to the port channel only when the switch does not receive LACP PDUs from
the peer, to make the link connected to the PXE client device as operational. As PXE clients handle untagged DHCP request, you need
to congure the LACP fallback only on an untagged VLAN to reach the DHCP/PXE server.
• After the LACP fallback election, if a port with lower priority port is congured to be part of the same port-channel, it would trigger re-
election.
Congure LACP fallback
1 Enable LACP fallback with the lacp fallback enable command in port-channel INTERFACE mode.
2 Set a timer for receiving LACP PDUs using lacp fallback timeout timer-value in port-channel INTERFACE mode.
3 (Optional) Enable or disable LACP fallback port preemption using lacp fallback preemption {enable | disable} in
port-channel INTERFACE mode.
Example conguration
OS10# configure terminal
OS10(config)# interface port-channel 1
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Layer 2