APA software

[hpuxrox]

Can someone tell me if APA can have an active/active configuration on two separate switches?

[Tim Nelson]

To a certain extent yes.

The switches need to be cascaded. We used Cisco 3850s ( i believe, 3000 somethings ;).

For load balance there are a couple different options. Typically LB_MAC is used with switches. LB_CPU is there as well but I never used/tested it.

Whether or not you can achieve a true 50-50 balance depends on the type of traffic and source/destinations. (it does not split session traffic, e.g. an ftp connection from one host will use the initial link for the duration of its session not flip back and forth while transfering data.

Been running with LB_MAC for many years and with my current work load the two NICs are pretty close to 50-50 on packets.

[Tim Nelson]

Another note:

We had weird issues running LACP, which at the time was the preferred protocal to use in the cascaded switch arena.

During boot, the handshake took to long and the aggregate would not start during boot but started fine manually after boot. HP recommendation was to NOT user LACP.

We configured manual ( which is FEC, not FECAUTO(FECAUTO is PaGP ). All worked great but because there was no mgmt protocal with manual we lost the logging/error reporting abilities. Had to leave the monitoring of the aggregate up to the LAN guys.