2910al - Stacking/Management?

[Paul Hutchings]

I'm putting in a pair of 2910al's at opposite ends of our site, with a 10gbps link between the switches.

The intention is it will be the dedicated switch for a basic vSphere stretch cluster.

I need to work out the routes to get traffic into and out of the switch (to all intents it will be managed as one LAN) if either switch is down, something I've no real experience of.

AIUI, by default each switch will have a management IP, each switch's IP will be on the same subnet.

Is it possible to "team" the switch's so they have a shared management IP where if both switches are available one is master, if one switch is down, the remaining switch is still available on the same IP?

It seems it would make setting up routing from the production LAN into the various subnets on the switch as lot easier?

Thanks.

[Jeff Carrell · Accepted solution]

You are describing more of a routing capability known as VRRP, which runs on top of a routing protocol such as RIP or OSPF.

That 2910 does not support such capability.

You would need to look at:
1)the E-Series E3500 with the added Premium License (to get VRRP and then I'd use OSPF)
-or-
2) A-Series A5500/A58000 and use IRF (IRF creates a virtual switch out of a small group of switches), or you could also use VRRP.


The 2910 does support "stacking" but in ProVision world that is one switch having the management IP addr of a group of switches, nothing more.

hth...Jeff

[Paul Hutchings]

Thanks Jeff, I did some reading after I posted and came to the same conclusion, that it's just management, there's no concept of redundancy or anything.

I think the way it stands I'm looking at not using IP routing on the 2910's but maybe using a basic firewall to let me into the iSCSI VLAN if the need arises.

Thanks.