LAN Design Question with HP Procurve

Trunking will work well. As noted, every compmnay has a different name. First time I ran into this there was no manual and no web access at the site. One call to HP got me to a tech within minutes and we had the trunks up in 10 minutes or less.

You 'bundle' them using LACP (known as a lot of things - "Ethernet bonding, NIC teaming, Trunking, port channel, link bundling, EtherChannel, Multi-Link Trunking (MLT), NIC bonding, network bonding" etc).

Trunking is a different but often linked technology where multiple VLANs are transmitted over a single connection, or LACP-linked 'bundle' of connections.

In terms of recommendations, at the very least I would create a single VLAN - this way you can more seamlessly introduce new VLANs in the future. The use of a pair of links from switch to switch makes sense, for failover support as much as increased performance.

Not totally clear how you want to link things though, maybe you could reword or create an image to embed? that would help I thing.

As for 4-way LACP 'bundles' - they are often supported but let's figure out more clearly what you're trying to do first before we get into that ok.