How To: IRF Caveats on FF5700 Flex Fabric

Some time ago, I posted on the configuration of an IRF independent resilient fabric with the HPE Flex Fabric FF5700 datacenter switches. During the operation some things arose to my attention which either have been corrected or perhaps not necessarily clear from the first place.

1.) Activate MAD

There needs to be a mechanism to detect multiple actives. This could be considered something like a quorum for the switch-cluster, intended to prohibit split brains. In my case I preferred to do so with LACP. This brings MAD (Multiple Active Detection) to the layer two and is rather simple. It should be configured on an appropriate Bridge Aggregation Group – resulting in an configuration like:

interface Bridge-Aggregation1
description DOWNLINK_SOMESTRANGESWITCH_WITH_MAD_ENABLED_ON_THE_SAME_LAG
port link-type trunk
port trunk permit vlan all
link-aggregation mode dynamic
mad enable

so specifically pay attention to the last command: Continue reading

How To Configure Multiple VLANs on one Synology Bond

Some times you may need perhaps more than one network at home connected to your Synology NAS. You are a geek and want to do strange VMWare things or you simply want your kids friends not to find the private family pictures.

Accessrights are one thing, hard network separation probably something entirely different. Even if you don’t want to separate traffic but want to support storage in different subnets probably you don’t want your homeuse- router do handle storage traffic. At least it is very smart to avoid that.

Conceptional this may be solved by interface overloading on the network interface of the storage device. You may have different network cards, to separatre traffic, but why would Continue reading

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

How-To: HPE FF5700 10G and Adapter Teaming to Windows 2012 R2

Vor einigen Wochen sind wir mit HPEs recht neuen 40G FlexFabric Switches aus der 5700er Familie gestartet.

Dem Duty Manager – bei HPE Service nach braucht man ja ein Installation Carepack um eine gescheite Firmware Version zu kriegen – dreimal darf der geneigte Leser raten was ich davon halte. Eine Aussage für die eben jene Hotline immerhin auch 144 Stunden während einer kritischen Inbetriebnahme gebraucht hat. Aber glücklicherweise ist dem nicht so und nach zehn ziemlich spannenden Tagen sind die Dinger jetzt tatsächlich im ruhigen Fahrwasser angekommen.

Zeit erste Konfigurationen aus dem Tagesgeschäft vor zu nehmen. Da wir eine IRF Konfiguration haben um einen komfortablen redundanten Netzwerk Core zu erhalten, bietet sich an auch Server per LACP an zu binden. Im IRF kann man ebendas Chassis- übergreifend auch Link Aggregation Groups anlegen. Dabei geht IRF über klassisches Continue reading