Removing single switch from IRF

[John_Jutte]

I have 3 switches currently in an IRF membership, 2 - H3C s5500 and 1 - HP a5500. They connect via IRF membership and I would like to remove the A5500 from the group (3rd member) while leaving the other 2 switches in place. The H3C documentation I was able to find says, disconnect the IRF fabic from the switch, run an undo command on the removed member to switch back to standalone mode.

However, the document stop there. As I read it would disable IRF on the member I pulled from the fabric, but what about the existing members? Do they auto update that the switch is missing? Do I have reconfigure their IRF? Can I do this without rebooting remaining IRF group?

Thanks,

John

P.S. This thread has been moved from Switches, Hubs, Modems (Legacy ITRC forum) to Comware-Based. - Hp Forum moderator

[EricAtHP]

Hi John,

You are on the right track. I just did this in my lab to confirm that it works as expected.

On the 3rd switch, you just need to delete the "irf-port"s. I also renumbered the switch so that the ports started with 1 again.

Assuming the 3rd switch was listed as member 3:

undo irf-port 3/1
undo irf-port 3/2
irf member 3 renumber 1
reboot

But keep in mind that this will remove any port configurations on the 3rd switch since all ports were originally 3/0/1, 3/0/2, etc. and will now be 1/0/1, 1/0/2, etc. But I like it because it makes more sense but doesn't hurt anything either.

On the existing two switches, you don't have to do anything and in fact can increase the bandwidth / resiliancy by connecting the ports that used to connect to the 3rd switch to each other. But let me explain a little just to make sure it will work.

I assumed that your 3 switches were originally in a ring with each switch having a connection to each other. Keep in mind that irf-port X/1 must connect to irf-port Y/2. So with just a single connection between the switches but the configuration for the connection to the removed switch 3 still in place IRF might look like this:

<HP>display irf configuration
MemberID NewID IRF-Port1 IRF-Port2
1 1 Ten-GigabitEthernet1/1/1 Ten-GigabitEthernet1/1/2
2 2 Ten-GigabitEthernet2/1/1 Ten-GigabitEthernet2/1/2

<HP>display irf topology
Topology Info
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
IRF-Port1 IRF-Port2
Switch Link neighbor Link neighbor Belong To
2 DOWN -- UP 1 b8af-6706-d0da
1 UP 2 DOWN -- b8af-6706-d0da

In this case the active IRF connection is between Ten1/1/1 and 2/1/2. It is possible to connect Ten1/1/2 to Ten2/1/1 and get some additional bandwidth and resiliancy. The topology would look like this:

<HP>display irf topology
Topology Info
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
IRF-Port1 IRF-Port2
Switch Link neighbor Link neighbor Belong To
2 UP 1 UP 1 b8af-6706-d0da
1 UP 2 UP 2 b8af-6706-d0da

Note that there were some versions of software where it didn't seem to come up completely reliablly and the IRF port would sit in a Timeout state. A reboot would fix it but at the same time, it didn't affect the performance of the switches.

There are other options too but would require reconfiguring the two remaining swtiches a little.

Hope this helps,
Eric

[sdarte]

When you pull the connectors out and isolate the stack, the ports will disappear from the stack.  The existing stack will only desplay the ports that are part of the existing stack for member 1 & 2

In the switch that you are taking out

[H] irf member 3 renumber 1

save the configuration

reboot the switch.

It should come back with the numbering set to 1 on the interfaces and not be a member of the IRF stack.