Etherchannel (Port Channel) on Cisco ASA

Generally Cisco ASA has one Management interface and four Gigabit Interfaces, but in modern systems and scalable Infrastructures you will need more than four Interfaces. To overcome this limitation you can configure some VLANs and trunk them to an Interfaces. This was a standard solution to this problem, however since ASA version 8.4.2 you are able to use Ether Channel to solve this problem.

The benefit of Ether Channel or Port Channel is that you are able to configure redundancy and load balancing in the same time; all four ASA Interfaces will be bundle to a link in the Layer 2 then you assign all VLANs directly to the Port Channel and so they applied to all Interfaces of ASA .

The ASA distributes the traffics to all Interfaces, which means you have the functioning Load balancing, furthermore if you lost one or two Interface the whole traffics will be distribute to the Interfaces which are available.
If you run the Port Channel on the ASA then you are permitted to make up to 200 VLANs.

The Port Channel’s configuration is not really tricky but it is a little bit complex and it will be best if you keep the history of what you have changed to not lose overview of what and why you actually configured.
Here you can see the Port Channel configuration on an ASA 5540 and a Catalyst 2960.
OK, first of all you have the configure the Port Channel on the Catalyst; it is very simple something like that:

1 2 3 4

! interface Port-channel1 switchport mode trunk !

Then I apply the Port Channel configuration, to four catalysts Interfaces which are connected to the ASA (in this case GigabitEthernet1/12 till GigabitEthernet1/15 :

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

! interface GigabitEthernet1/12 description UpLink to ASA switchport mode trunk channel-group 1 mode on ! interface GigabitEthernet1/13 description UpLink to ASA switchport mode trunk channel-group 1 mode on ! interface GigabitEthernet1/14 description UpLink to ASA switchport mode trunk channel-group 1 mode on ! interface GigabitEthernet1/15 description UpLink to ASA switchport mode trunk channel-group 1 mode on !

Ok we are finish with catalyst configuration; now let’s go to the ASA
Now we have to create the Port Channel:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

! interface Port-channel1 no nameif no security-level no ip address !

We apply the Port Channel 1 to four Interfaces:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

! interface GigabitEthernet0 channel-group 1 mode on no nameif no security-level no ip address ! interface GigabitEthernet1 channel-group 1 mode on no nameif no security-level no ip address ! interface GigabitEthernet2 channel-group 1 mode on no nameif no security-level no ip address ! interface GigabitEthernet3 channel-group 1 mode on no nameif no security-level no ip address !

The next steps are very important , for each VLANs you have to create a port-channel sub-Interfaces, in there you define the VLAN ID , IP address and the security-Level , I will show you here one inside and one OUTSIDE sub-interface:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

! interface Port-channel1.10 vlan 10 nameif inside security-level 100 ip address 192.168.XX.XXX 255.255.255.0 !

and

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

! interface Port-channel1.1000 vlan 1000 nameif OUTSIDE security-level 0 ip address dhcp setroute !

Well, that is all. !!

It is important to have the same VLAN’s number and VLAN’s ID of both side, there when you have a new VLAN you should apply that configuration in Catalyst first. For debugging and control the Port Channels you can use the :

1 2 3 4 5 6

show port-channel summary   Number of channel-groups in use: 1 Group Port-channel Protocol Ports ------+-------------+-----------+------------------------------------- 1 Po1(U) LACP Gi0/0(P) Gi0/1(P) Gi0/2(P) Gi0/3(P)

The command displays the number of Port Channel group and which Interfaces are member to this ; furthermore you can see the Channel-Group Protocol LACP ( Link Aggregation Control Protocol) ;you have to consider that Cisco ASA support LACP only (no PAgP ) ; you get more useful information by using :

1	Show port-channel detail

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Group: 1 ---------- Ports: 4 Maxports = 16 you see we use four Interfaces (Ports 4) you can extend that up to 16 Physical Interfaces Port-channels: 1 Max Port-channels= 48 you can configure 48 different Port Channel group Protocol: LACP/ active Minimum Links: 2  this is the minimum number of physical Interfaces for a Port Channel Group Maximum Bundle: 8 you can put maximal 8 physical Interface to a Port Channel Load balance: src-dst-ip Ports in the group: -------------------

For the Catalyst I prefer to use the :
 

1	sho etherchannel port-channel

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

sho etherchannel port-channel Channel-group listing: ---------------------- Group: 1 ---------- Port-channels in the group: --------------------------- Port-channel: Po1 (Primary Aggregator) ------------ Age of the Port-channel = 761d:02h:50m:21s Logical slot/port = 5/1 Number of ports = 4 HotStandBy port = null Port state = Port-channel Ag-Inuse Protocol = LACP Port security = Disabled Ports in the Port-channel: Index Load Port EC state No of bits ------+------+------+------------------+----------- 0 00 Gi1/0/45 Active 0 0 00 Gi1/0/46 Active 0 0 00 Gi1/0/47 Active 0 0 00 Gi1/0/48 Active 0   Time since last port bundled: 749d:02h:28m:31s Gi1/0/46

Just as the commands in the ASA , the catalyst will show you now the number of Port Channel , port channel status and the physical Interfaces which are applied to this Port Channel group .

Don’t worry about the Spanning-tree Protocol (STP ) on the Catalyst , the STP counts the four EtherChannel’s Interfaces as “one” link like a single port so no member of the EtherChannel will be blocked from STP to prevent looping , I personally use the portfast for each Port Channel member Interface but you have to modify the command for a trunk interface :

1	spanning-tree portfast trunk