Aruba/HPE Loop Protect vs BPDU-Protection or both?

[Delisaa]

Hey,

If I want to prevent switching loops on my network on an aruba 2930F switch, should I be using Loop Protect or BPDU protection or both? MyGreatLakes Login

[Ivan_B]

Hi @Delisaa !

Loop protection provides protection against loops by transmitting loop protocol packets out of ports. Since those packets are Layer 2 multicast frames, in case of a loop they will return to the switch on one or more ports. Thus switch will know there is a loop and depending on your switch model it will apply appropriate action - disable the port.

BPDU protection (BPDU Guard) is a security feature designed to protect the active STP topology by preventing spoofed BPDU packets from entering the STP domain. In a typical implementation, BPDU protection would be applied to edge ports connected to end user devices that do not run STP. If STP BPDU packets are received on a protected port, the feature will disable that port and alert the network manager via an SNMP trap.

As you can see both features have very different purposes. If you use Spannint Tree protocol in your network, it's more or less enough to provide you Layer 2 loop protection. BPDU protection applied on STP edge ports is just an additional security measure, nothing more. If you decided to not use Spanning Tree, then loop protection should be your protocol to go. So the real choice here is Loop Protection vs Spanning Tree.