Enabling STP with switch mesh

[Jesse Rink]

I have 12 switches in a mesh.

I currently have STP disabled but would like to enable it because we ran into a recent problem where someone plugged both ends of a cat5 cable into a 4 port hub which caused excessive broadcasts on our entire switch network. Fun tracking that one down.

If I enable STP on all my switches, will STP break the benefits of the mesh such as; better bandwidth utilization and dynamic load balanced paths? I'm wondering if enabling STP on will turn some of my 'live' redundant load balanced links in the mesh into mere 'backup' links, so to speak...

JR

[Matt Hobbs]

Hi Jesse,

Enabling spanning-tree within the Mesh will not block any of your mesh ports - so the benefits of Meshing will remain.

The only thing you need to make sure of is that all your Mesh switches are enabled with the same version of spanning-tree.

The Advanced Traffic & Management Guide contains some more information about this.

Matt

[Les Ligetfalvy]

I've been told by HP that the slow convergence of STP can affect the mesh but that RSTP is fine.