Hello Giovanni
In order to know which load balancing algorithm is best to use for your particular situation, it must be made clear that each algorithm must be applied in a particular direction on the etherchannel. And this direction will also affect the choice you make. For example, take a look at the following diagram:
This is a network with many hosts on Network A, and only one host (the edge router) on Network B. The edge router is the default gateway for all of the hosts on Network A. The majority of traffic from the hosts will be to the Internet.
So for traffic travelling from Network A to Network B, let’s take a look at what each algorithm would achieve:
- If we use destination MAC, then only one of the 6 physical links would be used, and the others would remain idle. This is because for all traffic from Network A to Network B, there will only be one destination MAC, that of the edge router. So all frames will be mapped to a single physical link.
- If we use source MAC, then we have many source MACs, one from each of the hosts. This means that each host on Network A would use a different physical link of the etherchannel, thus spreading the traffic over multiple links.
- If we use source IP, this would have the same result as source MAC, since we have multiple hosts with multiple IP addresses, thus each IP address would be mapped to a different physical link, distributing the traffic evently.
- If we use destination IP, and we assume all traffic is to the Internet, then we can assume that the destination IPs of all this traffic will be many different destinations, so an even distribution of traffic over the physical links would be experienced as well.
I hope this has been helpful!
Laz