Hybrid STP

[nsidharth1991]

Hello Community,

I have a hybrid network consisting of Cisco, Juniper and Aruba (wireless) in my environment. All edge switches consist of Cisco while the core switches are Juniper. While we migrated recently from an all cisco environment, we did not have any problems with STP and all was working as expected. When we migrated, STP started to fail on the Juiper switches. Whenever a loop occured in the network, the entire network collapses in a very short time. Right now, there are no loops while, failovers are being managed manually at certain core location. Since, failover and redundancy are extremely importatn, we are trying to get this issue resolved asap. All cisco switches run PVST while Juniper's are running their default Spanning tree. My question is whether we should make all the STP instances in the hybrid environment consistent? 
It would be a great help anyone has any ideas what could cause this mayhem?

Thank you.

Regards,

Sidharth Nandury

[Joseph W. Doherty]

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Posting

Yes, you want all your switches, in the same L2 topology, to run a compatible STP.

Juniper, I believe, by default runs a common RSTP, but supports VSTP, which can inter-operate with Cisco.  However, there's special considerations for VLAN 1.  I also recall there's a Juniper KB paper that explains how to inter-operate STP between Cisco and Juniper.

[nsidharth1991]

I referred to the Juniper KB paper you were talking about. Also, we've spoke to Juniper Support and have configurations according to their recommendations. Currently, we do not have any loops in the network. We are basically trying to figure out what kind of STP instances are inter-operable between the two vendors.