Connection through a fabric extender

[pawel szarko]

Hey Guys,

im new at this IT thing, so sorry when i dont understand everything right away. I have difficulties connecting 2 switches:

I have a cisco nexus 5020 with a fabric extender and a Aruba switch. The aruba switch is my core switch and the nexus is not connected to anything at the moment. What i wanted to do is to connect the aruba switch through a standart port with a port on the fabric extender and see if i could get an IP address from the network. So i connected a both with a network cable. I set the port of the extender to trunk and it's up, but i get no ip. Trying to ping something in the network i get an errror massage: " sendto X chars, No route to host". They are both in the same subnet and the same vlan. Is this even possible? I tried everything i know. Thanks.

[Richard Pidcock]

You FEX (fabric extender) switch is just that, it's an extension of another cisco switch.  Your fabric extender will have to be connected to your Nexus switch.  What sounds feasible is that you connect your FEX switch to you Nexus 5K, then your 5K could connect to your core switch, but you definitely cannot connect your FEX directly to your Aruba core switch.

[marce1000]

       >.... wanted to do is to connect the aruba switch through a standart port with a port on the fabric extender 
                - That is not supported , you can only have end nodes (aka 'users') connected to fabric extenders , 

 M.

[pawel szarko]

Thanks for the Replies. I did some testing. So i did manage to connect the Aruba switch with the extender. Obiviously this didn't just work, but i managed to do it with the command "spanning-tree bpdufilter enable". I know it is very risky, because it could cause a broadcast storm if you are not carefull, but for those with the same problem it is a solution that is at least working. I also set the port as a trunkport because i needed it, but i dont think this is really necessary.

[marce1000]

                         >....it is a solution that is at least working
  - Actually it isn't ; since this is (totally) unsupported you risk  network interruption with business impact , for certain network loads or traffic patterns. 

  M.