technology, networking and IP telephony
Posts tagged VRRP
Nortel Large Campus Technical Solution Guide
Sep 15th
Nortel 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!
Virtual Routing Redundancy Protocol (VRRP)
Jan 23rd
We’ve been using VRRP in conjunction with SMLT to make sure that either core ERS 8600 switch in a cluster could assume the default gateway for any specific VLAN should the other switch fail. While I’m not at liberty to get into specifics I can tell you that we recently ran straight into a wall with our VRRP configuration. We had about 60+ VLANs (port based) on an ERS 8600 switch cluster where the VRRP ID for each VLAN was set to “1″. While Nortel had previously said this configuration was supported, we ran into significant issues testing some new software code for the 8600.
In short Nortel is now advising that you MUST have unique VRRP IDs. Nortel recommends as best practice that you use the VLAN ID but that can be problematic since valid values for the VLAN ID are between 1..4096 and valid values for the VRRP ID are between 1..512. In my case the VLAN IDs were between 1 and 200 so I was able to match them up.
config vlan <VLAN ID> ip vrrp <VRRP ID> address <IP ADDRESS> config vlan <VLAN ID> ip vrrp <VRRP ID> backup-master enable config vlan <VLAN ID> ip vrrp <VRRP ID> enable ERS8600:5# config vlan 1 ip vrrp 1 address 10.10.1.1 ERS8600:5# config vlan 1 ip vrrp 1 backup-master enable ERS8600:5# config vlan 1 ip vrrp 1 enable ERS8600:5# config vlan 2 ip vrrp 2 address 10.10.2.1 ERS8600:5# config vlan 2 ip vrrp 2 backup-master enable ERS8600:5# config vlan 2 ip vrrp 2 enable ERS8600:5# config vlan 9 ip vrrp 9 address 10.10.9.1 ERS8600:5# config vlan 9 ip vrrp 9 backup-master enable ERS8600:5# config vlan 9 ip vrrp 9 enable
I believe Nortel is now recommending RSMLT in place of VRRP which we’ll be using going forward. If you’ve been using a VRRP ID of 1 in every VLAN you might want to consider changing your configuration. I hope to write a post about RSMLT in the near future detailing how to configure it and the advantages using RSMLT over VRRP.
A personal note of Thanks to Richard M. and Roger G. from Nortel for their help and assistance in troubleshooting this problem.
Cheers!
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