Best practice on setting 6509 L2 IP address

[Rosa Ladeira]

I'm looking for any suggestion as to what others have found to be a best practice to configure an IP address to 6509 running Layer 2.

I want to ssh 6509 from a host anywhere on my LAN.

Thanks in advance.

Rosa

[Reza Sharifi]

Rosa,

If the 6509 is layer-2 only, then you need to configure an SVI for the management subnet so you can SSH to it.

example

vlan 10

name mgmt

interface vlan 10

ip 10.10.10.1 255.255.255.0

You need to add this vlan to all your trunks and also create it in all your switches (with different IP address but same segment)  That is your mgmt subnet and vlan for you to SSH, telent,etc...

HTH

[Rosa Ladeira]

Reza, in your example vlan 10 is routing (because it has an IP address) even thoutgh 6509 is a layer 2 swtich ?

Thanks

Rosa

[Reza Sharifi · Accepted solution]

That is fine.  Even though the device is layer-2 only, you still need to have an IP address on the device in order to be able to SSH, Telnet, etc... to it..

If there is no IP, how else would connect using SSH or telnet to the device?

Reza

[Rosa Ladeira]

Thanks a lot.

Regards,

Rosa

[Jon Marshall · Accepted solution]

Rosa

Just to add.  If a switch has one L3 vlan interface (SVI ) it does not mean it is routing. L2 switches use an SVI for managment purposes but they don't route traffic, at least not in the way we generally refer to routing. When a switch is L2 only for connecting to and from the switch  it acts simply as an end host would ie. with an IP address and a default-gateway.

The default-gateway is important if you want to connect from a different vlan and you probably would as the switch management vlan should not be used by clients. So from the example above where vlan 10 SVI on the 6500 is 10.10.10.1, if you wanted to telnet/ssh to the switch from another vlan then you would need a default-gateway added to the 6500. The default-gateway would be the IP address of the vlan 10 SVI on the L3 switch that is routing for vlan 10 (this is obviously not the 6500 we are talking about here).

Jon

[Rosa Ladeira]

Thanks you.

Regards,

Rosa

[Joseph W. Doherty · Accepted solution]

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Posting

Besides what the others have already described (short version, a L2 switch management address is basically its "host" address) and can be placed on any VLAN/subnet that reachable from other VLANs/subnets, you might want a dedicated vlan/subnet for management IPs.  This then also allows additional security to be applied.

[Rosa Ladeira]

Thanks.

Regards,

Rosa