Posts Tagged VLAN

Nortel Large Campus Technical Solution Guide

NortelEnterpriseArchitectureNortel recently released a highly technical document, Large Campus Technical Solution Guide, that should be a great benefit Nortel customers.  This document covers an amazing amount of information and is a treasure trove to organizations looking for best practice approaches to managing and deploying their Nortel data equipment.

The document covers topics such as convergence between IP telephony and data networking, chassis versus stackable, Layer 2 versus Layer 3 at the edge, redundancy, high availability, clustering (IST/SMLT), two tier and three tier network designs, VLANs, Spanning Tree, Control Plane Rate Limit (cp-limit), Extended CP-Limit (ext-cp-limit), VLACP, SLPP, QoS, VRRP, RSMLT, ECMP, Multicast, EAPoL and the list goes on and on. And best of all they provide configuration examples for a large number of the scenarios which are always helpful.

A lot of the material I cover here in my blog is covered in this document. I’ll probably pull a few excerpts from this document over the next few months and make some posts out of it, expanding on some of the examples and filling in any unanswered blanks.

I’m impressed with effort that Nortel has made in trying to “get out the word”.  This is really a great tool for Nortel customers! Let’s hope that Avaya will allow these folks to continue with their success.

Oh behalf of all those Nortel customers out there let me say “Thanks!

Cheers!

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ECMP, IST, QOS, RMLST, SLPP, SMLT, TECHNICAL GUIDE, TSG, VLAN, VLAP, VRRP

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ADAC and VLAN Configurations (Part 2)

In a previous post titled ADAC and VLAN Configurations I described some issues we were having with some of our switches where VLAN memberships were mysteriously changing. We suspected ADAC and we were right on with our suspicions.

We performed some exhaustive testing with ADAC over the past few weeks and can confirm, as Roberto alluded too, that ADAC will dynamically reconfigure any switch port that has ADAC enabled to the VLAN membership and PVID setting that was set when ADAC was first enabled on the switch port. In our tests we configured an edge port as a member of VLAN 10 and then enabled ADAC on that port. We then added the edge port to VLAN 11, removing it from VLAN 10. When the port went into an oper-down state ADAC added the edge port back to VLAN 10 and removed it from VLAN 11. We confirmed the same behavior with respect to the PVID changing.

In short if you need to make a VLAN membership or PVID change to an ADAC enabled port you MUST disable ADAC on the port before making the change and then re-enable ADAC when you have completed your change. As a side note any Nortel IP phone that is connected to the port will most likely timeout and reboot itself when you disable ADAC.

While I don’t necessarily disagree with the behavior it would be nice for either the CLI of Device Manager to alert someone if they tried to change the VLAN membership of a port that had ADAC enabled. (hint hint Nortel)

Cheers!

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ADAC, VLAN, VOIP

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ADAC and VLAN Configurations

We’ve just recently come across this problem and I thought it would be a great topic to share and perhaps even solicit some feedback from others. As you might already know I’ve been deploying ADAC across a large number of Nortel Ethernet Routing Switch 5520s with great success. ADAC allows the switch to control the phones voice VLAN configuration.

Well we also ran into a problem after upgrading a number of those switches to v5.1.1.17. A network administrator had made VLAN changes to various ports on the switch prior to the upgrade but after ADAC had been enabled on the ports. After the upgrade the switch ports defaulted back to the original VLAN they were configured for when ADAC was first enabled. We performed some additional testing and found that this problem would occur if the switch was just reset (rebooted) so it doesn’t appear to be tied to the upgrade but rather the action of restarting the switch. Looking at how ADAC works I can understand the problem but I’m disappointed that Device Manager or the CLI interface doesn’t throw a warning when you try to change the VLAN configuration of a port with ADAC enabled.

The lesson here is that you should disable ADAC on any port where you intend to change the VLAN membership.

Anyone else seen this?

Cheers!

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ADAC, PORTS, VLAN

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