When to choose STP over Fabricpath ?

[Stefan Marcin]

Hi, I recently learned about FabricPath technology, which looks really good. When I am trying to learn new things and it says it replaces the old technology and I know differences between these two technologies I need to know one more thing. Except when you have different vendors and different switch models, is there any other case when it is better to use STP than FabricPath ? Because in my understanding FabricPath cannot be used in cases when you dont have all switches which support this feature. Thanks.

[Julio E. Moisa]

Hi

Yes, that could be a reason to use STP over Fabric Path, when not all the devices support that feature. 

The following links could be useful:

https://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/stp-is-not-the-problem-but-fabricpath-will-fix-it

https://www.networkcomputing.com/networking/why-cisco-fabricpath/1037862534

:-)

[Stefan Marcin]

Are there any other usecases ? Or this is really the only one. Thanks.

[Julio E. Moisa]

Hi

Other reason is that with STP you have a primary path to reach the root, now if you have more than one link, one will be used to reach the root bridge and the others will be put as standby / alternative paths and not being used, it is a sub optimal path utilization. With fabric path it is different because you can use all the uplinks and it can optimize the bandwidth for the traffic. 

https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/products/collateral/switches/nexus-7000-series-switches/at_a_glance_c45-605626.pdf

Hope it is useful

:-)

[Stefan Marcin]

Maybe we are misunderstanding here a little bit :), maybe I am over-thinking here, but I am trying to think about usecases when we will rather use STP than fabricpath. So again, having different switches is the only reason to still use STP or does STP have any other advantage over fabripatch or there arent really any advantages.