Make 2 physical ports to act as one on a 3750

[arbakhtiari]

Hi,

I have a Catalyst 3750G which is directly connected to two Juniper Firewalls on HA. Before the HA of Firewalls, it was was directly connected to one Firewall. Now with the HA, I've been forced to go through another switch (2960) and put 3 ports in the same VLAN to make the connection, which is not ideal as my 2960 has FastEthernet ports.

The physical port on the 3750 has an ip address of 10.10.10.1 and the Firewall has 10.10.10.2.

If I want to bypass the 2960, what solution do I have?

1- Should I remove the physical address, create an Interface VLAN with the same address and assign 2 ports to that VLAN?

or

2- Is there a way to bridge 2 ports and make them use one physical address?
 

[Jon Marshall · Accepted solution]

Use your first option ie. create vlan/SVI and assign both ports into the same vlan.

You are probably aware of this but if you have HA for your firewalls you would probably want to have a second switch as well, probably stacked.

Jon

[arbakhtiari]

Hi Jon,

Thanks for your reply. I'm gonna test that though.

Another question came into my mind regarding the second switch you mentioned, why choosing stack over let's say GLBP or HSRP?

Thanks.

[Jon Marshall]

By all means test but if it worked with both firewalls connected to a 2960 and then one connection back to a routed port on the 3750 then I would be amazed if it doesn't work.

Stacking gives you greater throughput between the switches. You could connect the switches with a trunk link and run HSRP/GLBP if you wanted but the more usual setup is to stack the 3750s.

If you did use stacking then obviously each firewall would be connected to a different switch in the stack.

Jon