Ethernet ring network questions and also trunking

[azazel1024]

This is more of a thought exercise than anything, because I don't need to setup a ring network (right now anyway). What are the general advantages, other than redundancy if a link is lost? I am looking at especially a very small ring, such as with 3 switches.

Would standard Spanning Tree Protocol handle this fine? Or would RSTP really be needed to see any kind of performance advantages.

The only things I can see are path redundancy if a link goes down. Would STP handle higher bandwidth using the extra links? For example, if I had 2Gbps of ingress data to switch 1, that was going to switch 2 with only a single link between each switches, would the switches handle this by limiting the rate to 1Gbps going from Switch 1 to 2? Or would it allow 2Gbps of flow with 1Gbps going Switch 1 to 2 and 1Gbps going Switch 1, to 3 to 2?

On a seperate question of trunking, anyone have SMB Multichannel experience with trunking? I am using it right now intraswitch with 2 links to my server and 2 to my desktop to provide 2Gbps of bandwidth. If I (for some crazy reason) decided to seperate them across switches, if I trunked/aggregated a pair of links between the switches, could I still do 2Gbps? Or would the switches limit it to 1Gbps per TCP/IP session across the switches (and treat the SMB Multichannel traffic as a single session? Or is it treated as mulitple sessions?)?

The trunking/aggregating question is a bit more pertinent as I am out of ports on my 16 port TP-Link SG2216 so I found a cheap used 16 port Trendnet TEG-160ws 16-port switch and I was planning to aggregate 2 links between them as the uplink. Just curious if it is possible to use that as 2Gbps of true interswitch throughput, or if it is going to be limited as seperate 1Gbps links for 2Gbps of max throughput, but 1Gbps per session/link/whatever (like at least traditional link aggregation works on a server in my experience).

I plan on keeping the desktop and server on the same switch and carrying more ancillary connections on the second switch, but I am curious how the switches will handle the 2 port trunked uplink.

Thanks!

 

[theonlyski]

I don't believe you'll get 2Gb/s of traffic using 1Gb/s for your uplinks. Best way to do that would be with an etherchannel. With an etherchannel, it should logically act as 2Gb/s.

You can use a 'loop' type of topology and provided everything is capable of STP or RSTP, should have no issues with loops forming. RSTP will generally re-converge faster. STP will block one of the legs on the furthest switch so there won't be any data crossing it until it detects that the preferred route is no longer viable and switches over.