Cabletron Systems 04-0053-01 Soft PVC and PVP Connections, Soft PVC and Soft PVP differences

Virtual Ports and Static Connections Soft PVC and PVP Connections

Things To Watch Out For When Creating Virtual Ports

•Make certain that the virtual port number (Base VPI) plus the VPIs designated by MaxVpiBits does not exceed the Available VPIs as specified by MaxVpiBits in the set portconfig command.

•If you create more than one virtual port on a particular physical port, make certain that you do not run out of Available VPIs as specified by MaxVpiBits in the set portconfig command.

•If you create more than one virtual port on a particular physical port, make certain that no overlap occurs among the VPIs used by the virtual ports.

•Make sure the CAC policy is set correctly for the number of virtual ports.

•Make certain that the traffic descriptors used by the virtual ports were created with the appropriate bandwidth and category of service.

•Use the set cacserviceclassbw command (on a per-port basis) to allocate sufficient bandwidth to the specified service class

5.4SOFT PVC AND PVP CONNECTIONS

The SmartSwitch 6500 supports both soft (or smart) PVC and soft PVP connections. Soft PVCs and PVPs are used to create PVC and PVP connections between ports on separate switches that are separated by a PNNI network. Normally, PVCs and PVPs must be configured manually from switch-to-switch across the network. However, soft PVCs and PVPs need to be configured only at the source and target switches. The connection is then routed through the PNNI network. Additionally, soft PVCs and PVPs take advantage of PNNI’s self-healing and crank-back capabilities. With conventional PVCs (for example), it a link goes down on the network, the PVC connection is broken. With soft PVCs, however, if a link goes down, PNNI has the capability of finding an alternate path to the target, thereby reestablishing the PVC connection.

Note Soft PVPs are supported on the SmartSwitch 6500 ATM switch only.

Note Only point-to-point soft PVCs and soft PVPs are currently supported.

5.4.1Soft PVC and Soft PVP differences

The differences between soft PVCs and soft PVPs are essentially the same as those between standard PVC and PVP connections:

•Soft PVCs are identified by a VPI number and VCI number

•Soft PVPs use only the VPI (VPCI)

•Soft PVPs must use a VPI > 0

•Soft PVPs must be eventually terminated on virtual ports

SmartSwitch ATM User Guide 5-11