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Re: Distributed Trunking and active/active

 
Fred Blum
Valued Contributor

Distributed Trunking and active/active

 

I've had a discussion with our consultant today configuring the new 3500yl switches. I wanted to have Distributed Trunking between the switches to enable active/active network adapter bonds on the SAN nodes across switches.

 

He was not familiar with distributed trunking but disputed the concept of having active/active network adapters engaging in network traffic on clients. According to him if you would set that on a server running VMware you would have two adapters responding to a ping and VMWare logging errors.

 

That is not the question we are using Hyper-V and we were wanting to set this on our four P4300 SAN nodes. That would be a separate VLAN on the switch as the current 2910al switches do not support distributed trunking.

 

If I am correct Active/Active is 802.3ad team bonding and is recommended for the SAN nodes to have active/active connections.  A prerequisite is distributed trunking.

 

Am I correct?

 

TIA,

 

Fred

 

 

 

 

2 REPLIES 2
Northwoods
Frequent Advisor

Re: Distributed Trunking and active/active

DT is a feature that was added to the Procurve 3500's, 5400's, and 8200's last year. I'm assuming you are talking about a pair of 3500yl's with DT configured connecting to a single 2910al and at which point you'll just build up an 802.3ad trunk from the 2910al to a DT configured on both 3500yl's.

 

As long as your using the DT for layer 2 only you should be ok. Once you look at doing routing or VRRP plus DT then it may or may not work so well. On the latest firmware (as of last week) most of the bugs have been fixed. We've been working with HP since summer 2011 on iron out all the bugs with DT + VRRP.

 

Cajuntank MS
Valued Contributor

Re: Distributed Trunking and active/active

I currently have mine in ALB mode connecting to some 2910al switches; but we are actually about to do this same thing, except using 2 new 3800 series switches stacked via their stacking module. According to what I am reading and have been told by my HP reseller, no DT needed as these switches will be truely stacked and I'll just create the LACP trunk using one port from each switch for my connection to my SAN node. Rinse and repeat for each node.