VLANs on Blade GbE2c L2/L3 etherblade switch and HP 1800-24G

[Rob Dyke]

I've recently taken delivery of c3000 chassis with GbE2c L2/L3 switch and two blade servers. This is to be connected to my 1800-24G switch. Also connected to 1800-24G switch are two cisco firewalls, each with two subnets.

I am trying to use VLANs for logical separation of traffic. I am trying to use trunks to give maximum connectivity between c3000 and switches.

Please see attached diagram (JPG).

I need the traffic from the blade servers to be able to reach the cisco firewalls over the trunk. By using VLAN, tagging and ingress filtering I want to ensure that, for example, only 192.168.129.0/24 subnet traffic can travel between port 12 on the 1800-24G and the blade switch ports 3 & 4.

I can make a trunk between the GbE2c L2/L3 and the 1800-24G. However this is not very stable, with "own BTU detected" messages in the log of the blade switch, leading to ports being set down. I think this is to do with the lack of Spanning Tree (STG) support on the 1800-24Gs. Perhaps I need to disable STG on the ports in the trunk on the GbE2c L2/L3 switch(?) I have had some success with VLANs, tagging and Ingress-Filtering and other controls on the 1800-24G. Yet this is not quite there yet either.

Does any one have any comments or pointers on what I should be investigating to create my desired network separation?

[Rob Dyke]

A little more information.

I currently have the following VLANs configured on both switches.

1800-24G
VLAN 30: ports 5 (to GbE2c) and 20 (to Cisco)
VLAN 130: ports 4 (to GbE2c) and 18 (to Cisco).

GbE2c L2/L3 switch
VLAN 30, ports 2 (blade server eth1) and 24 (to 1800-24G, port 5)
VLAN 130, ports 14 (blade server eth2) and 23 (to 1800-24G, port 4)

I can ping between the firewalls and the blade servers (yet still have annoying SYN timeout for anything more than ICMP traffic).

Single VLANS on single uplinks works fine.

I'd prefer to have a trunk between the GbE2c switch and the 1800G switch and allow traffic for multiple VLANs over the trunk. Is this possible and how do I go about it?