Citrix SD-WAN

Link Aggregation Groups

The Link Aggregation Groups (LAG) functionality allows you to group two or more ports on your SD-WAN appliance to work together as a single port. This ensures increased availability, link redundancy, and enhanced performance.

Earlier, only the Active-Backup mode was supported in LAG. From Citrix SD-WAN 11.3 release onwards, the 802.3AD Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) protocol based negotiations are supported. The LACP is a standard protocol and provides more functionality for LAGs.

In Active-Backup mode, at any time only one port is active and the other ports are in backup mode. The active and backup supports rely on the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) package for LAG functionality.

With the LACP, you can send the traffic through all the ports simultaneously. As a benefit, you get more bandwidth along with the link redundancy mechanism. The LACP implementation supports the Active-Active mode. Now with the Active-Backup mode, you also have an option to select full LACP Active-Active mode from the SD-WAN UI.

The LAG functionality is available only on the following DPDK supported platforms:

  • Citrix SD-WAN 110 SE
  • Citrix SD-WAN 210 SE
  • Citrix SD-WAN 1100 SE
  • Citrix SD-WAN 2100 SE
  • Citrix SD-WAN 4100 SE
  • Citrix SD-WAN 5100 SE
  • Citrix SD-WAN 6100 SE

Note

The LAG functionality is not supported on VPX/VPXL platforms.

Limitations

  • You can create a maximum of four LAGs with a maximum of four ports grouped in each LAG on the Citrix SD-WAN appliances.

  • The port priority and system priority options are not supported with the LACP implementation.

With 11.3 release onwards, in SD-WAN with the LACP implementation, the ports are always in active mode. That means SD-WAN can always start the negotiation.

Note

  • For Citrix SD-WAN 210 SE appliances, you can create only one LAG with a maximum of three ports grouped in it.

  • The Link State Propagation (LSP) feature is not supported if LAGs are used as Ethernet interfaces in Interface Groups.

From Citrix SD-WAN 11.5 onwards, you can configure Link aggregation groups through SD-WAN Orchestrator service. For more information, see Link aggregation groups.

Monitoring and Troubleshooting

To view the statistics or the link state, navigate to Monitoring > Statistics. Select Ethernet from the Show drop-down list.

LAG statistics

To view the active and standby LAG ports, navigate to Configuration > Appliance Settings > Network Adapters > Ethernet.

LAG port details

Select the LACP LAG Group tab to view the various details related to the LACP LAG group.

LACP LAG group

Note

You cannot change settings for individual member ports, any configuration changes made to the LAG, is automatically pushed to the member ports.

You can download the log files for further troubleshooting. Navigate to Configuration > Logging/Monitoring and select SDWAN_common.log from the Log Options tab.

Log file

Link Aggregation Groups