MSTP INTEROPERABILITY OF THE DELL™ POWERCONNECT™ 6200 SERIES SWITCHES WITH CISCO IOS AND CISCO
CONTROL PACKET BEHAVIOR
BPDU: Always transmitted as untagged. The port receives and transmits BPDUs in all three
MSTP states: Discarding, Learning and Forwarding. If MSTP is disabled for the device (manual forwarding on all ports), BPDUs received are switched.
GVRP: Always transmitted as untagged. GVRP PDUs are received and transmitted only when the port is in Forwarding state.
GMRP: GMRP PDUs are transmitted tagged or untagged as per the port’s tag setting. They follow the ingress and egress rules.
LACPDU: LACPDUs are always transmitted untagged and are received and transmitted in all three MSTP states. These frames are never switched whether MSTP is enabled or not.
Pause Frames: Pause frames are never tagged or switched. The port receives and transmits Pause frames in all three MSTP states. In other words, the STP state of the port has no bearing on the transmission and reception of Pause Frames.
Other Frames to and from the CPU: All other frames are received and transmitted only if the port is in Forwarding state.
All BPDUs (ST, TCN, RST, MST, etc.) use the unique MAC address of the transmitting port in their Source MAC address field and comply with IEEE Std.
The unique MAC address for a stacking switch is the base MAC address of the stack unit plus the port number.
MSTP CLI COMMANDS
You can configure MSTP on the Dell PowerConnect 62xx series switch by using the Web interface or the
clear
name (mst) revision (mst) show (mst) exit (mst) abort (mst)
show spanning-tree
For more information about each command, including the syntax and variables, see the Dell PowerConnect 62xx System CLI Command Reference.
Configure MSTP by using the Web interface on the pages under the Switching > Spanning Tree menu.
APRIL 2008 | 6 |
