I had an interesting experience yesterday working with a client who had a stack of 3 Avaya Ethernet Routing Switch 3549GTS-PWR+. The units were properly cabled but they wouldn’t stack with each other. In the past while working with the Avaya Ethernet Routing Switch 4000 or 5000 series you only needed to physically connect the stacking cables and power on the switches and they wouldstack together. You might have to check which switch was set to base using the dip/selector switch on the back of the switches, but there wasn’t much to it. I spent about 30 minutes fumbling with these switches until I stumbled across document NN47203-303 on Avaya’s support website.
It turns out that with the latest generation of switches from Avaya you need to manually enable “stacking” mode on the switches before they will stack. The ports on rear of the switch, usually associated with stacking, can be used as regular ports? Perhaps in a SPB type deployment?
I had to issue the following commands to all three switches;
>enable #config t #rear-ports mode stacking #save config #reboot
After making that configuration change to all three switches and rebooting them they finally all stacked together.
Learning something new every day!
Cheers!
Mike
The stacking in the ERS35xx is different to all the other Avaya switches. On the ERS4k or 5k platform you have a dedicated stacking port with an extra stacking cable and connector. Here on the low end ERS3500 series they just used 2x a normal RJ45 1000BaseT copper port.
In dafult they can be used as a normal port. As discribed with the “rear-ports mode stacking”
command you can set the rear ports to stacking.
Be aware that you have here a potential bottleneck in the stack because the stacking bandwith is not so high as we are used to in the ERS4k and 5k switches.
The ERS35xx is also not capable of SPB. On the VSP7k platform you can enable the Rear ports for SPB and loose the stacking capabilities of the device. But that is a complete different mechanism to the ERS3500 stacking.
Cheers
As I understand SPB, the interconnects are operating as normal ports rather than stacking mode. In a pure SPB stack, having them default to normal mode would make sense.
@Frank
The ERS3500 does not support SPB. That you can configure the rear port mode on the VSP7k platform has the backround that they have merged up to 3x 40 Gig in the Stacking port of the rear site of the switch. To use these ports you need a fabricInterconnect cable wich can only plugged into a VSP7k. So it is not possible to use the rear ports on the VSP7k as normal ports for connecting e.g. servers or clients. On the ERS3500 you have two standard RJ45 ports for stacking so it makes sense that you can use these ports in a single unit when stacking is not needed to connecte servers or clients.
The rear ports on the Nortel/Avaya ERS2500 series could also change personality using the same command. It was probably more useful on the 2500, as it only had two gigabit ports on the front (the rest were 100 Mbps) so setting the rear ports to “standalone” (non-stacking) would get you another two gigabit ports. I do recall that they didn’t support autonegotiation.
@Dominik
The rear ports of ERS3500 are SFP ports and not 1000BaseT.
I would like to have them pre configured in stacking mode because that is the most used way of these ports. It would make things much easier if you want to replace a faulty unit from an existing stack with AUR. You always have to set the rear ports mode first after unpacking.
Florian
Ran into the same issue a few months back, had me scratching my head for a while.
Hi,
good informations here on Avaya switches. Do you know if there are different generations of “Avaya / Nortel BayStack 4548GT” in term of firmware? For example, if I buy one (second hand) on the market, is it easy to update/upgrade the firmware and is it something you can do free of charge, I mean just download it from a website (which one?) and upload it to the switch?
Another question about the “Avaya / Nortel BayStack 4548GT”, in one documentation it appears that the router with a red line all around the front side are POE. Is that true?
Thanks in advance for your help
Regards
Erix
Hi Erix,
There are different software releases, you’ll need a maintenance contract to download the software from Avaya’s support website.
Yes, the ports highlight in red support PoE and PoE+.
Cheers!
I have a query regarding about some QoS testing over Avaya switch, recently we change our Internet service provider and existing hardware from Cisco to Avaya so we need to test QoS testing over the network on cisco used to do it with this command :
class-map VOICE
match access-group name VOICE
!
class-map SIGNALLING
match access-group name SIGNALLING
policy-map SET-QOS
class VOICE
set dscp 46
class SIGNALLING
set dscp 40
class class-default
set dscp 0
Could you please advise me how can I run this test over Avaya 3500 switches.
Hi Max,
Not really on topic but I’ll answer… on the Cisco you are remarking the packets. On the Avaya you just need to set your uplinks/downlinks as Trusted and they will honor the tags that come in from the edge device. If you wish to get granular you’ll need to define a QoS policy on the switch.
Good Luck!
am using avaya vsp 8000 as core. Need to configure primary and secondary core switches with multiple lan IP’s. How to configgure that….
Hi Michael,
Long time subscriber, keep up the great work!
I have an Avaya 3500GT-PWR which will not allow me to get past the banner. It doesn’t matter how many times I hit CTRL-Y, it does absolutely nothing. I am stuck at the Avaya banner and there is no way out. I have tried different serial cables and different computers all to no avail. Any idea what I can do? I don’t mind factory resetting it, but I have to get past the CTRL-Y screen first to do that. Any suggestions for me?
Thanks a lot,
Eric
Hi Eric,
I’ve seen this myself from time to time and it’s always been my USB to serial adapter or cable that was the issue. It sounds like you have confirmed that your laptop configuration is working properly on another switch?
Cheers!