how to setup secondary switch to take over the path if the main switch is down?

[airwolf09]

My 5412zl keeps on crashing in the last 2 weeks which cause the whole network to go down. I want to put another 5406zl in place as backup to take over the path in case of the 5412zl going down and do all the routing until we identify the problem with the 5412zl. What is the correct way of implement the mesh domain?

 I want to setup 5406zl ip 10.0.1.4 as the backup so that it takes overs as root and do all the routing when 5412zl is down.

 Is the 5406zl need to manually configure with all the vlans that 5412zl had and turn on the routing and spanning-tree priority set to 1 or 0?

 5412zl (core switch) is a root switch with:

1.  spanning-tree priority 0
2. trunk port A1 with all vlans to 5406zl port A1
3. Do all the routing for all vlan

 5406zl is secondary switch:

1. spanning-tree priority 1
2. trunk port A1 with all vlans to 5412zl port A1
3. currently no routing on this switch

Can you please suggest me how I can get the second switch to take over the path and do all the routing, etc.. for the network if 5412zl is down?

[paulgear]

What you want is VRRP. This requires an additional license on the 5400 series, unless you purchased it after the big licensing change that HP announced (sometime in the last 12 months or so?).

However, i would be trying to work out why the 5412 is crashing first. What if it's an IP routing bug that's causing it to crash? Then you might end up with two crashing switches...