Tag Archives: STP

How To: High Availability with Aruba 2930F – VSF

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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: IRF Caveats on FF5700 Flex Fabric

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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 IRF on HPE FF5700

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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 →

EtherConnect Caveats 2

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Letztes Post über EtherConnect war ja recht begeistert und der wesentliche Haken waren die Speed- Duplex Settings an die ich mich bei meiner zweiten EtherConnect Leitung besser mal erinnert hätte.

Erinnert habe ich mich allerdings an einen Fehler, der etwas später zu geschlagen hatte. Nach der anfänglichen Euphorie traten doch immer wieder nicht geahnte Netzwerk Performance Themen auf die sich auch zunächst nicht wirklich erklären ließen.

Bis dann im Logging auffiel dass sporadische Spanning Tree Root changes auftauchten. Wichtig! EtherConnect ist transparentes Layer 2 Ethernet zwischen entfernten Standorten Continue reading →