Alcatel Unleashed

Looking for some help if you would.

I have (2) 6850-48 switches connected with (4) cables via (2) MDR-8000 point-to-point Ethernet radios. Each radio has (2) ports for redundancy that are enabled full time. They do not switch over during a failure. I have setup a (4) port aggregate group on ports 45-48 and tagged them 802.1q.

My issue is the following:
a. The switches are not load balancing between all the ports. There is traffic passing but not equal amounts. (2) of them are pretty close but the other (2) are off by a considerable amount. (1) of those last ones is pretty much not passing anything at all. Seems to be split 40%,40% 9%, less than 1%
b. If I disconnect any of the (4) ports I lose a considerable amount of the traffic. I thought it would fail over to the other (3).

I can set the radio to do the following:
1. Port A only
2. Port A & B switched (In case of a card failure. Only 1 on at a time.)
3. Port A & B summed (Shares the radio capacity on both ports)

Question
1. Should I make the (2) ports on the radio "switched" so during a I/O card failure it will switch to an operational port? I thought this would interfere with spanning tree although I understand its disabled in aggregate groups.

I think I might be missing something or there is a better way to attack the situation.

Thanks for any help in advance

Regards,
Santo

Hi,
I don't know me with mw radio devices, but might it be possible that MDR-8000 do not support 802.3ad (aka link aggregation) ?

Its possible. I did try turning off the B port on each radio and using them as separate channels. The traffic still is isolated to (1) radio. At this point the radio is a bridge. This would remove the requirement for the radio to handle the link aggregation. Now that I think of it, I don't think I changed the aggregation down to 2 ports. I left it as 4 and the status of the ports that were turned off was "Down". Hmmmm.......I am going to test that out.

I am streaming approx. 120mb on radio 1 in the above mentioned mode and 1mb on radio 2. When its in A&B summed its 60 on port 'A' radio 1, 58 on port 'B' radio 1, 2mb port ''A Radio 2 and 200kb port 'B' radio 2.'