Q: ProCurve 5038; Any pitfalls when moving from mesh to trunk/rstp/routing

[Adri Rijnart]

Hi,
Because our lan requires routing functionality we plan to change our 5 ProCurve 5038xl's from mesh to trunk (/w rstp) config. There are 4 vlan's configured on various ports, for which the routing is required.

Question: Are there any known pitfalls i can expect (apart from performance degrade by not having the mesh and recalculating the spanning tree)?

Cheers, Adri

[koppendorfer]

better you configure the 5300 within a ospf
area you have then routing, vlansupport and loadbalancing over all switches, with no stp need, also you can configure xrrp for failover

[Adri Rijnart]

ospf for routing.., ok. But can you be more specific about your reply?

Cheers, Adri

[koppendorfer]

see config example http://www.hp.com/rnd/support/config_examples/5300xl_ospf_singlearea.pdf

[OLARU Dan]

1. For RSTP you should determine, for each switch, which ports/trunks are used for uplinks, and set these ports/trunks to "Edge=No" in Spanning-tree configuration screen.

2. Also if you have hubs or switches connected to ports of RSTP-running switches, you may want to set "Point-to-Point=Force-False" for these ports.

3. For any port that is connected to a bridge or switch that is known to be using STP (not RSTP), "MCheck" should be set to "No".

All these make RSTP work faster.