Your best practice adding VLANs to MSTP instance

[Patrick Terlisten]

Hello members,

I currently trying to develop some kind of best practice for adding VLANs to MSTP instances. I have some customers with redundant ProCurve E-Series (mostly 5400, 8200) switches, running VRRP and two MSTP instances. Unfortunately it happened that a customer was trying to add a VLAN to an instance beginning with one of the core switches... bad idea. The switch dropped off the instance and the customer was'nt able to revert his change, because the network connection from his notebook to the core was dropped. To make the long story short: How do you add VLANs to your MSTP instances? I would like to collect some more opinions about those kind of changes.

Thanks for you help.

Regards,

Patrick

[Mohammed Faiz]

Hi,

It might sound a bit simplistic but our switches all share the same VLAN as a management VLAN which means I know what the MSTP instance for that VLAN looks like and I can apply the changes to the edge of that tree working back to the root in the direction of the workstation I'm applying the changes from.
Other things that help include making use of the "pending config" to minimise the switchover and pre-populating MSTIs with the VLAN ids you may use in the future.
The bottom line for us is that it's always an "outage period" change.

[Patrick Terlisten]

Hello Mohammed,

thanks for you feedback.

Regards,

Patrick