Connecting a nortel and cisco switch on an L3 link

[royalblues]

I want to connect a Cisco L3 switch to a Nortel L3 switch as a Layer 3 link.

I want 2 links between them for redundancy.

If i create a VLAN on the cisco switch and and put the 2 ports conencting to nortel on this vlan & assign an IP to the SVI, would i be required to create the same vlan on the nortel ?

If it had been a single link, i would have configured the cisco port as routed and created a vlan/IP on the nortel and assigned this port to the vlan.

Does anyone have any idea about configuring this type of setup?

Narayan

[vijayasankar · Accepted solution]

Hi Narayan,

As you are using two links between the two switches, STP is involved in this scenario, which may eventually block the redundant link.

Ideally i would suggest to bundle those two links as a single logical link by using LACP between those two switches. ( must be supported by Nortel switch!!)

Then assign the LACP logical link to one vlan in cisco switch and in the nortel switch.

Assign the ip address to the SVI of this vlan.

This will ensure that both the physical links are used fully and redundancy is also taken care.

Note: Theoretically, the vlan id that you create in cisco and nortel for this purpose need not be the same, as you are going to use the link as pure L3.

Hope this helps.

-VJ

[royalblues]

Thanks Vijay,

That is what i was trying to do but my knowledge on nortel is very limited.

Nortel is also live in the network and hence i do not wish to do anything on it.

Here is what i plan.

Create a new vlan (say 100) on the nortel switch and assign an SVI ip address (1.1.1.1/30).

Put a port (say 4/1) in this vlan and connect a cable from this port to the Cisco L3 on say (port 1/0/1)

Make this port a routed port with IP 1.1.1.2/20 and use static routes.

does this sound OK ??

Narayan

[vijayasankar]

Hi Narayan,

Ok. This should work.

If you want redundancy then you would have to create another vlan in nortel to connect the other link back to cisco and place the link in a different subnet.

-VJ

[royalblues]

Will try this during the weekend and keep you posted on the findings.

Cheers

Narayan

[royalblues]

The above thing worked perfectly.

In the meantime will check to see how to configure L3 etherchannel in the nortel box

Narayan

[vijayasankar]

Hi Narayan,

Thanks for the update.

-VJ