Users Guide

11–Marvell Teaming Services
General Network Considerations
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The figures show the secondary team member sending the ICMP echo requests
(yellow arrows) while the primary team member receives the respective ICMP
echo replies (blue arrows). This send-receive illustrates a key characteristic of the
teaming software. The load balancing algorithms do not synchronize how frames
are load balanced when sent or received. Frames for a specific conversation can
go out and be received on different interfaces in the team, which is true for all
types of teaming supported by Marvell. Therefore, an interconnect link must be
provided between the switches that connect to ports in the same team.
In the configuration without the interconnect, an ICMP Request from Blue to Gray
goes out port 82:83 destined for Gray port 5E:CA, but the Top Switch has no way
to send it there because it cannot go along the 5E:C9 port on Gray. A similar
scenario occurs when Gray attempts to ping Blue. An ICMP Request goes out on
5E:C9 destined for Blue 82:82, but cannot get there. Top Switch does not have an
entry for 82:82 in its CAM table because there is no interconnect between the two
switches. Pings, however, flow between Red and Blue and between Red and
Gray.