Re: Fabricpath vs STP

mohammadnouman86 · ‎03-24-2020

Greetings of the day,

hope you are fine.

i am new to Nexus world, therefore i have a question and would really appreciate an answer from your valuable knowledge and experience,

in our company we have 4 nexus 5k Switches which are running Fabricpath and are interconnected as follow,

Lokation 1 Lokation 2

S1--------------S1

S2--------------S2

S1--------------S2

S2--------------S1

my job is to first activate the link between nexus 5k and 9k and then replace the Nexus 5k switches which are currently active and in production, with Nexus 9K Switches, and the problem is as you know Nexus 9k doesnt support Fabricpath.

we have connected one 40G link between each old switch and new Switch.

my question is, what points should i consider brefore activating the link and migrating the switches ?

is STP and Fabricpath interoperable ?

will there be any outage because of convergence ?

i would really appreciate your valuable inputs and guides.

Thanks in advance and sorry for my bad english.

Sergiu.Daniluk · ‎03-29-2020

Hi,

is STP and Fabricpath interoperable ?
my question is, what points should i consider brefore activating the link and migrating the switches ?
will there be any outage because of convergence ?

Yes, the STP and FP are interoperable and works together just fine.

One important thing to consider is that the FP switches must be the root of the STP domain. In fact, there is a built-in root-guard enabled on all Classical Ethernet (CE) ports, in case a superior BPDU is received. Thus, you need to ensure that STP priority on N9K is lower then compared with N5K.

Regarding outage, well, the convergence will not cause an outage, but as always, make sure you are doing any changes outside working hours.

I do not know if you are planning to implement vxlan or not in your dc, but here is a migration whitepaper from FP to vxlan:

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/switches/nexus-9000-series-switches/white-paper-c11-740217.html

I would recommend reading it. It will give you more details on what possibilities you have to for interconnecting the N9K with FP domain.

Regards,

Sergiu

mohammadnouman86 · ‎03-30-2020

Hallo msdaniluk,

thank you very much for the answer.

stay safe..

Best regards,

Mohammad