What's the difference between LACP and Trunking?

Problem/Symptom

What's the difference between LACP and Trunking?

Solution

Trunking and LACP
Link aggregation is the technique of taking several distinct Ethernet links to let them appear as a single link. It has a larger bandwidth and provides the fault tolerance ability. Besides the advantage of wide bandwidth, the I/O traffic remains operating until all physical links fail. If any link is restored, it will be added to the link group automatically.

Trunking
Trunking is not a standard protocol. It defines the usage of multiple iSCSI data ports in parallel to increase the link speed beyond the limits of any single port. However, you may need to make certain that the quantity of bonded NICs on switch and Qsan NICs are the same, otherwise there is possibility of seeing dropping performance or performance could be unstable.

LACP
The Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) is a part of IEEE specification 802.3ad. It allows bundling several physical ports together to form a single logical channel. A network switch negotiates an automatic bundle by sending LACP packets to the peer. Theoretically, LACP port can be defined as active or passive. Qsan controller implements it as active mode which means that LACP port sends LACP protocol packets automatically. Please notice that using the same configurations between Qsan controller and gigabit switch.

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