How To: High Availability with Aruba 2930F – VSF

Considering recent posts on IRF, there was a need to get some availability with the more cost effective switches from the Aruba / ProCurve world. I did some research on that and luckily there are more than one option today with this platform – at least the 5400s (…) and in my case 2930s support this by default.

Considering redundancy you basically consider two types of high availability and these cover Layer 2 availability, traditionally suited with link aggregation which conventionally does not span several chassis, and Layer 3 availability for a redundant default gateway service.

In a traditional design, then with a couple of switches (at least four), you configure VRRP for L3 redundant default gateway service, LACP – link aggregation groups for L2 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