Hi,
I have an IPS running inline VLAN pair mode that bridges 2 x VLANs into 1 x L2 broadcast domain allowing servers in one VLAN and gateway in another to connect to each other while forcing traffic via the IPS for screening etc.. This operates over a trunk link so there is 4 pairs of VLANs in my case getting bridged by the IPS from one switch to another, with the IPS being in the middle and this works well.
I unfortunately was only given budget for one IPS at the moment and would like to introduce a backup L2 path that the traffic will failover to in the event the IPS for some reason can't bridge the VLANs. I was hoping that STP would handle this so when the IPS dropped out, using PVST the VLANs would transition to forwarding on the backup link.
The problem is without something bridging the VLAN pairs, i can't find any elegant solution to this problem and was wondering if anyone had any ideas?
Since the gateway lives in VLAN 10 say and the server in VLAN 110, if the IPS goes offline then without manually changing the VLAN the server is in to be the same as the gateway I'm not sure if a way to make this automagic.
I thought of using the 'VLAN translation' feature on our 6513 to rewrite the VLAN tag of frames on both ingress/egress of the secondary trunk link but when i tested the config it didn't seem to work.
If anyone has any ideas on how to make this work i'd love to hear.
thanks
Scott
