Connecting two Nortel 8600 over two Metropolitan Area Ethernet

[Peter Nguyen]

Hello,

I need suggestions, ideas to connect two Nortel 8600 over two lines of layer 2 Metropolitan Area Ethernets (Metro-E). 
My goal is to multilink two 40 Mbps circuits from two different carriers for bandwidth and redundant.  Nortel SE suggested configuring MLT and VLACP.  Has anyone successful doing this?

Cheers!

[Michael McNamara]

Hi Ngutri000,

You should easily be able to-do this over an Ethernet transport. Nortel's MultiLink Trunk (MLT) is just a proprietary way of bonding multiple links together similar to Cisco EtherChannel solution. VLACP would be used to make sure that you had end-to-end connectivity over the Ethernet transport. If the carrier had an issue in their network you might not necessarily realize there was a problem because you'd still have link on both sides, VLACP is just a heartbeat between the two interfaces to make sure that there's connectivity.

The only comment I would have for you... you would need to use 100Mbps Ethernet interfaces.... and the carrier would sub-rate them (even though the connection would be 100Mbps the carrier would only forward 40Mbps). You would also want to look into traffic shaping for the ERS 8600 to help better balance the load between the two links.

Good Luck!

[Peter Nguyen]

Michael,

Thank you for not only this advice but also many blogs you have written about Nortel network.  Your blogs are rich with information and easy to follow instructions.

Best regards,

TN