HP Procurve 4204 + 2848 Configuration for High Availability

[Manuel_S]

Hi,

i have to deliver the configuration for a Procurve 4204 thats connected to two Procurve 2848 which then are connected to a Citrix Xenserver via active/active bond.

Im looking for a "hint" to configure the switches for high availability in a way that the core switch (Procurve 4204) always reaches the server, cause im unexperienced in configurating switches and dont really know what to lookup for.

An advice to where i can find the informations im looking for would be nice (i couldnt find it for this specific requirements on the HP-Support Page, could be i missed something there).

Thanks a lot.

[paulgear]

To my knowledge there's not really anything you can do in those switch models to provide true active/active resilience. The best you could do is connect the 4204 to both 2824s in a triangular arrangement (preferably with an LACP trunk of 2 or more ports for each link) and configure spanning tree to ensure that the 4200 is the root.

If the XenServer is using Linux bonding in tlb or alb mode, it doesn't actually need switch-level support, and as long as any packets coming out of the server have a path to all switches, you should be good.

[Manuel_S]

Thanks for your reply, as much as i know its not possible to use trunking on those switches (my superior told me there has to be a way without trunking), i also have to mention that VLAN´s will be disabled for this setup.

Will it still be able to run with your suggestion without trunking?

regards

Manuel

[paulgear]

Both of those switch models definitely support trunking.  There may be other reasons why it's not possible in your environment, e.g. not enough ports.

Also, make sure your superior means trunking in ProCurve terminology - what ProCurve calls trunking is elsewhere called many other things (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_aggregation ), but it's not the same as what Cisco calls trunking (which is just VLAN tagging).

If you run your NIC bonding in active/standby mode, you should be able to put one into each 2824 without any additional setup.

Regards,