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Showing posts from April, 2019

Stacking switches Part - II (HP/Aruba VSF - Virtual Switching Framework)

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HP also produces another line of switches which are called procurve switches. After HP's acquisition of Aruba Networks, those procurve switches are marketed as Aruba switches. Some of the Aruba switches support stacking. And it is called: VSF - Virtual Switching Framework. Again, I will not cover the stacking architecture, I will show only how to configure a VSF stacking between two Aruba 2530F series switches. Let's define our network constraints; the example has following characteristics - The stack is consisting of two (2) Aruba 2350F series switches of same model and software version. In each switch two (2) 10G ethernet ports are used for stacking purposes. The stacking ports in the switches can be either cross connected or straight through connected in ring topology. In VSF, how switches are connected with each other does not matter. The switches are connected as the diagram below -  Fig 01 - Aruba VSF with 2 switches VSF allows stacking by using

Stacking switches Part - I (HPE IRF - Intelligent Resilient Framework)

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Last couple of days I was busy configuring stacking of switches from different vendors. So, I thought it would be better to share my experiences and lessons that I have learned while configuring stacking technology from different network switch vendors. I will not go to the details of different stacking architectures, rather only try to cover how to configure them. First in line is - HPE IRF (Intelligent Resilient Framework). Let's define our network constraints; the example has following characteristics -   The stack is consists of two (2) switches of same model and software version. In each switch two (2) ethernet ports are used for stacking purposes. The stacking ports in the switches are cross connected in ring topology. The switches are connected as the diagram below -  Fig 01 - HPE IRF with 2 switches IRF allows stacking by using normal ethernet network ports, no special stacking ports are required. We have selected 2 forty gigabit ethernet por