Chapter 1 Introduction

Table of Contents

HP Auto Port Aggregation (APA) is a software product that creates link aggregates, often called trunks, which provide a logical grouping of two or more physical ports into a single fat pipe. This port arrangement provides more data bandwidth than would otherwise be available and enables you to build large bandwidth logical links into the server that are highly available and completely transparent to the client and server applications. HP APA provides the following features:

Automatic link failure detection and recovery
Support for load balancing of network traffic across all of the links in the aggregation.
Support for the creation of failover groups, providing a failover capability for links. In the event of a link failure, LAN Monitor automatically migrates traffic to a standby link.
Support for the TCP Segmentation Offload (Large Send) feature, if an aggregate is created with all Ethernet cards capable of TCP Segmentation Offload (TSO).
Support for Virtual VLANs (VLANs) over APA link aggregates and failover groups.
Support for 64-bit MIB (RFC 2863) statistics, if all the interfaces within a link aggregate or failover group support 64-bit statistics.
Support for IPv6 addresses on a link aggregate or failover group.

For release-specific information, see the release notes on the web at:

http://www.docs.hp.com

For a summary of HP APA capabilities, see Appendix A.

Chapter 1 Introduction

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