Spanning Tree Protocol on HP5406zl and Netgear edge switches

[SteveDolphin]

Hi All,

I've a network that looks a little like this:

A simple star network setup, a core HP switch with servers and storage, and WAN uplinks on it, and then trunked 2 x 1GB uplinks to some crappy old Netgear switches (I know, but moving on).

We recently had a network storm. After some invesigation we found the loop-protect features of the HP, but this seems to be for edge ports only. We then realised that perhaps what we should do is have spanning tree enabled, and so my question is about how best to do this.

I understand that the core switch should be set up as the bridge with priority 0, and I'm assuming that the Netgear trunked uplinks need to be set up as something like a priority 4, but is this right or do I only set the Netgear trunk priority on the Netgears and not on the HP? The edge switches only know about two VLANs, 1 (normal) and 3 (guest wifi).

So my real question is - should I enable spanning tree, and if so... how?

[Vince-Whirlwind]

If the Netgear switches support spanning-tree, then 

 - enable spanning-tree on the 5400 and set it as priority 0

 - enable spanning-tree on the netgears and leave them with default priority

You don't need to configure spanning-tree port priorities.

[SteveDolphin]

The Netgears do, yes. So I don't need to worry about setting trunk or port priorities? 

If it's that simple then that's great, thanks!

On other switches where endpoints are connected directly into the switch should I conisder the loop-protect feature too?

[Vince-Whirlwind]

Yes, configure loop-protect on all ports that are patched to anything that doesn't participate in spanning-tree.

[SteveDolphin]

Thanks! I'll let you know how it goes!