How To Configure IRF on HPE FF5700

Approaching a certain quality level of switching and routing, high availability evolves to be an obligation. In these terms, according to the different OSI service layers, there are many high availability protocols, securing the according network services. The Spanning Tree family as STP, RSTP, MSTP, PVST, protocols for link aggregation as LACP and layer three routing redundancy services like VRRP.

These protocols have the advantage, being vendor independent standards and presume to be interoperable. But either design gets complex, interoperability keeps its caveats or ressources are simply disabled and take over in failiure. Thats not exactly performance driving.

So vendors created stacks – which failed otherwise, or they started to create systems of higher complexity which proprietary created load sharing high availability clusters in the Continue reading

HowTo activate SNMP on vSphere 6.0 hosts

Monitoring ESXi with an standard open source monitoring tool usually requires SNMP. Searching for SNMP in the vCenter configuration context this simply allows you to start the service – but not exactly leads to success in the first place. Probably you get an error.

You check in the security profiles and find the service stopped although it is configured to start with the host. Manual start delivers an “ooops”.

Looking for an clickable configuration context did not lead to an solution I was aware of. Continue reading