Michael McNamara

Avaya ERS 3549GTS-PWR+ Stacking

Michael McNamara — Fri, 31 Jul 2015 11:36:07 +0000

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

ADAC and VLAN Configurations

Michael McNamara — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 22:30:22 +0000

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!