Layer 2 Switch failover

[jennyjohn]

I have two Layer 2 switches connected between each other using a failover cable. These switches are placed between the Service Provider Devices and our firewalls (as shown in the digram) and all ports are configured in the same vlan. How does the failover work in this case? would there be a loop?

If the service provider devices does not have a failover cable between them, will the failover work?

Is there any good documentation regarding this?

Thanks in advance.

[lgijssel]

It will depend on how the firewall does its failover.

When it uses a virtual address between the physical devices (like hsrp) this setup should work.

As long as the link between the FW's is not a transparent layer2, there will be no loop.

Things become more tricky when the fw's are also doing L2.

In that case you need to break the loop with STP.

regards,

Leo