topic Re: Link Discovery with Arista switches in Software Defined Networking

Link Discovery with Arista switches

codybum — Mon, 26 Jan 2015 19:51:11 GMT

Using the HP SDN controller I am unable to get path/link discovery working with Arista switches.

Using a simple configuration where two Arista DCS-7050QX-32-F are connected together no paths are discovered by the controllers. I have tried both interface and VLAN binding.

The switches are recognized by the controller and rules can be pushed, but discovery is not working.

I have attached two controller traces, where one is a working discovery using a set of Force10 switches and the other is a non-working discovery using the Arista's.

Of course our HP switches work as well.

Anyone have any experence with Arista and the HPC controller?

Cody

Re: Link Discovery with Arista switches

piricchio72 — Thu, 29 Jan 2015 13:59:48 GMT

Hello,

How are the 2 Arista switches connected?

Are you using a trunk?

Which vlan interface is the untagged vlan in this trunk?

Is LLDP enabled on the Arista switch and also on the interconnecting interfsaces?

Also, Arista switches only support version 1.0 of the protocol and their support for Hybrid mode is experimental.

Although I do not see this playing a role can yu disable hybrid mode on the controller?

(From the controller GUI go to Applications-> com.hp.sdn.ctl.of.impl.ControllerManager->Hybrid=false)

Does this make any difference?

Regards,

Antonio

SDN CoE Team

Re: Link Discovery with Arista switches

codybum — Sat, 31 Jan 2015 10:51:19 GMT

The physical topology is as simple as possible at the moment. The two switches are connected together via 40G electronic cable, which I can confirm works in regular switch mode.

I have tried with trunks and regular access ports. Specifically, I have tried bindings (Arista term) using both VLAN and Interface modes.

I have run several software loads on this switch in atempt to get something to work. Recently, I aquired an early access release that implements OF 1.3 (including a "normal" pipeline), but the switches don't even show up as nodes in the topology when using this code.

I was really wanting to use these as aggrigation switches, but this might not be possible.

Is it possible to simply use these switches to pass traffic between two otherwise working OF switches? Would such a thing be possible, or would you run into issues?

Thanks,

Cody

Re: Link Discovery with Arista switches

codybum — Sat, 31 Jan 2015 17:02:58 GMT

Wow!

Ok. When I disabled hybrid mode the topology works and everything is discovered.

The problem is that the Arista's don't have a normal mode, so the initial rule push fails.

The only issue is that while I don't need hybrid on the Arista's I do need it on the HP switches.

Do you know if there is a way to either selectivly set hybrid, or the ability to push rules when a normal outputs fail?

Thanks!

Cody