My understanding is that etherchannel uses a hash calculation on the destination and/or source mac address to determine which leg to send a packet on.
While I was reading IBM's etherchannel support in AIX I came upon a small item that stated you can change the policy to round-robin. THis would mean that one source/destination session would have it's packets sent over all legs of the etherchannel. There is a comment that this could cause some packets to be received out of order.
1) Does a filer support this type of etherchannel? My understanding is that replies are always sent from the same adapter the received packet came in on, even if the adapter is part of a etherchannel. It seems that a filer wouldn't card about this.
2) Do ethernet switches support this kind of etherchannel?
3) pro/con
I guess the question is - can this kind of etherchannel be used to make a true load balanced pipe either directly into a netapp or via network switches.
Thanks