HP Network Direr Software Products manual Configure aggregated links using Lacp

Misconfigurations and Optimizations Report 871

If a port connected to a single end station is set to disable, whenever the attached end station is powered up, the Spanning Tree protocol will treat this as a topology change event. This results in the Filtering Database entries being flushed and temporary flooding of traffic occurs until the addresses are re-learned.

XRN Fabric Setting up VLANS with Distributed Resilient Routing

Distributed Resilient Routing allows the switches in the XRN Distributed Fabric to act as a single logical router. This provides router resiliency in the event of failure in one of the interconnected switches.

The loss of a unit in a Distributed Fabric does not affect routing, provided all units can communicate with each other on all VLANs.

All VLANs must be set up on the Distributed Fabric and surrounding devices, to ensure that during an interconnect failure units can continue to communicate with each other.

Configure aggregated links using LACP

Distributed Link Aggregation ensures that all member ports of an aggregated link distribute the traffic flow across the XRN Distributed Fabric. This provides resilience and enhanced performance.

If a switch within the Distributed Fabric fails, aggregated links will redirect all traffic down the link(s) to the unit that is still operating.

The optimal solution is to use LACP aggregated links. The 802.3ad (LACP) protocol can automatically resolve network loops and increase bandwidth by automatically creating aggregated links when multiple connections are detected between two devices. To use LACP, the device connected to the XRN Distributed Fabric must support LACP, and must be manually enabled.

Note that manually aggregated links or resilient links are not resilient in the event of an XRN interconnect module failure. This is because the device connected to the Distributed Fabric will not be aware that there is no longer a connection between the units in the Distributed Fabric. The device will continue to send traffic over both links, resulting in data loss.