Spanning tree / redundancy on 29xx series for HP Lefthand SAN

[Steven Hewitt]

Hi guys,

We have a simple bus topology at the moment using 2900 and 2910's. 10Gig (CX4 or SPF) between each switch over two server rooms.

Now getting this changed into a ring topology instead, still with 10Gig backbone between each switch.

The reason for going to a ring is for redundancy as we are moving from fibre to iSCSI for our storage technology. The new SAN is a HP LeftHand / StoreVirtual P4500, and it's used for our VMWare hosts to use as storage for our VM guests.

My question is what is the best way to implement redundancy and loop blocking. What spanning tree or other protocol would be best served in this enviornment and also how to deploy it onto a live production network....?

We do have PCM+ however nobody really knows how to use it properly so I'll be doing the config by hand in the CLI / menu.

Cheers,

Steve

[LorenzoCastro]

Hello Steven, Best practices would really call for separate physical switches for your SAN and with a P4500 either a CMC host with dual NICs for access to the iSCSI segment or an attached routeable iSCSI segment, so the storage nodes and the CMC can communicate with each other.  You would also want to look into enabling jumbo frames and possibly flow control.  You do not want anything interfering with your iSCSI traffic or you will have really bad performance.  I would also check the storage forums as I'm sure this question has come up before. 

With that said, you also want to read up on multiple spanning tree in the advanced traffic management guide for your switch and do plenty of planning before you implement any of this. 

Here's a best practices guide for the p4000.  4500 would be similar.

P4000 & vSphere BP 

Here's the Advanced traffic management guide for the 2910 (confirm your firmware version)

AdvTrafficMngmt